Page - 85 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

85 Lazarus’s necropolitical afterlife up with developments that had taken place decades before in the much larger metropolitan cities of Paris and London: instead of attracting a more or less homogeneous audience that was rooted in local traditions, the Volks theater [popular, commercial theatres] became dependent on a heterogeneous cross-section of the urban population, a collection of anony- mous spectators from very different backgrounds. (Linhardt 2008, 69) Up until the replacement of the glacis, the former military forti- fication that protectively encircled the first district, by the Ring- strasse, which began in 1859, Vienna “basically had five profes- sional theatres: two court theatres and three commercial ones” (Yates 2008, 52). The latter — the Theater in der Josefstadt, the Theater in der Leopoldstadt, which became the Carltheater, and the Theater an der Wien — were all outside the old walled cen- tre. While what was then still called the k.k. Hof-Burg theater was relocating from the Michaelerplatz to a prestigious new po- sition across the burgeoning Ringstrasse from the City Hall and the University, where it officially opened in 1888, new theaters were opening mostly in the Vorstadt outside the ring. Joining the Harmonie-Theater in the ninth district in the Wasagasse, which opened in 1866; the Etablissement Ronacher, in the cen- tral Seilerstätte, which opened in 1888; the Raimundtheater in the sixth district, which opened in 1893; the Kaiser jubiläums- Stadt theater in what is now the Volksoper, which opened in 1898 and was originally a “notorious ‘Aryan theatre’”; and the multi-media complex Venedig in Wien [Venice in Vienna] in the Prater in 1895 (ibid., 52); the Deutsches Volks theater opened in 1889 on the other side of the glacis, next to what had been the royal stables, which is now the Museumsquartier. These new theaters had to accommodate their repertoire to the audiences finding their way to them. As Linhardt documents in Residenzstadt und Metropole [Imperial Capital and Metropo- lis], her “immensely informative examination of the structure of the theatre scene from 1858 to 1918,” the period saw a dramatic revolution in taste in favor of operetta so that “by 1910 the total