Page - 62 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

62 siting futurity With the rise of anti-immigrant populism in Europe, the popularity of these films seems to be increasing there. “Wel- come to” titles such as Bienvenue à Marly-Gomont (2016, dir. Julien Rambaldi), translated into English as The African Doc- tor and German as Ein Dorf sieht schwarz, and Willkommen bei den Hartmanns (2016, dir. Simon Verhoeven), translated into English as Welcome to Germany and left untranslated in French, evoke with their titles the immensely successful Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (2008, dir. Dany Boon) and depict the difficulties well- off locals have when confronted with African immigrants. In Austria, these films have a precursor in I Love Vienna (1991, dir. Houchang Allahyari). An important difference of this story of an Iranian German teacher and Sisi fan, who must come to terms with a Vienna that does not conform to the myths he is expecting when he leaves Iran with his younger sister and son, so that the son does not have to do military service, is that it is told from the perspective of the migrant and does not play how awful Austrians are for laughs but rather shames them.5 The protagonist does remain a “foreigner,” however, with all of the problems that brings with it. As Christina Kraenzle reminds us, such an approach “does little to escape national paradigms of analysis and — at its worst — falls back on troubling notions of a national Leitkultur ‘enriched’ by importing new voices and ‘for- eign’ influences” (Kraenzle 2009, 91). Drawing on the work of Hito Steyerl, Kraenzle specifies that “[s]ubsuming transnational cultural production within national rubrics can also be a way avoiding larger political questions regarding civil inequalities, migration policies and minority rights” (ibid.). As we should re- member from the theoretical debates around Michael Walzer’s 1997 On Toleration, attempts to create tolerance are doomed to fail because even if the intolerant in the audience are made somewhat more tolerant, neither they nor the already tolerant driver and bodyguard was criticized as “a continuation of white privilege” and of “the turgid black-white buddy trope” after the film won the Oscar for Best Picture (Davies 2019). 5 For more on this film see Ingram and Reisenleitner (2013, 88–93).