Page - 50 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

50 siting futurity That the Arena occupation was going to be an influential part of Viennese cultural history was already clear in the 1977 documentary, Arena besetzt [Arena Occupied], (dirs. Franz Grafl, Josef Aichholzer, Ruth Beckermann), thanks to which the above performances have survived.17 While it remains open to speculation whether the kidnapping of Schöps owner, Ludwig Böhm’s wife, Lotte, in December of that year was connected to the Arena occupation,18 the Proletenpassion necessarily was, in no small part due to the key role that the Schmetterlinge played during the occupation and both their and the piece’s success. The latter can be gauged by the fact that in the next two years it was performed a further 130 times, eighty of which in Germany. The studio recording that followed in the fall of 1977 appeared in many LP and CD editions as well as pirated versions (Unger 2015, 20),19 helping the piece to become “such a touchstone among the Viennese left that unions there made it part of the training that apprentices underwent” (Ingram and Reisenleitner 2013, 68) and engaged teachers used the songs in their lessons (Un- ger 2015, 7).20 The Schmetterlinge went on to represent Austria at the 1977 Eurovision Contest with the satirical song “Boom Boom Boomerang,”21 and their popularity spilled over into the very successful career of one of their members who was particu- larly active in the occupation, Willi Resitarits, who left the band 17 The documentary continues to be screened on occasions such as the forti- eth anniversary of May ’68, when Vienna’s Film Museum showed it. 18 She was released five days later after he paid the twenty-one million Schil- ling ransom that was demanded. The kidnappers were caught a few weeks later, after the Christmas holidays, when they made a suspiciously large bank deposit. That Böhm was at the time the President of the FK Austria Wien soccer team, may also have been a factor. 19 See also “Schmetterlinge (Oesterreich) – 6 Alben” n.d. 20 One can see the nostalgia it awakens in one critic’s description of its having been “damals in einer eleganten roten Box auf drei Langspielplat- ten veröffentlicht” [“produced back then as three long-play records in an elegant red box”] (Mießgang 2015). 21 They came second-to-last.