Page - 84 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

84 siting futurity of its Lazarus production and the contribution it made to the ensemble’s repertoire at a critical time in the theater’s history. I show how its unique interpretation of the necropolitical ten- sions inherent in the work, which underscore the violence in American culture, supports a feminist revisiting of sadism and the decoupling of it from masochism pace Deleuze’s argument in Coldness and Cruelty. The Viennese Lazarus helps us answer to the fundamental questions the musical and its afterlife pose: why, as he lay dying, did Bowie choose to return to the character of Newton, and why has that return resonated so much in the Germanophone sphere? Vienna’s Volks theater The “Deutsches Volks theater” was established at a formative moment in Viennese socio-cultural history, as key work by Marion Linhardt and W.E. Yates details. After six decades of rel- ative institutional stability, Vienna and its cultural institutions transformed markedly in the last third of the nineteeth century: The rapid expansion of the city from about 500,000 by 1860 to nearly 750,000 by 1885 (over a million, counting the dis- tricts outside the city boundaries which would be incorpo- rated in 1891) and over 1,600,000 by the end of the century; the increase both of the urban bourgeoisie and of the work- ing class, in a city where mass poverty had already become a problem by 1848; the rise of nationalism that followed the Treaty of Prague and the constitution of December 1867; the growth of anti-Semitism; the financial crash of 1873 — all these factors colour the theatre history of the period. (Yates 2008, 51) That history tells of the effects of a shifting, expanding demo- graphic on the growth of the city’s theatrical offerings: [A]s Vienna underwent rapid expansion in the last third of the nineteenth century, the Viennese theatre scene caught