Page - 103 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

103 Hardly Homemad(e) his work in the city and the country taught him about the power of its traditions of oppositional culture and the strength they lend its public sphere. Encounters of the Increasingly Close Kind Bitte Liebt Österreich — erste österreichische Koalitionswoche [Please Love Austria — First Austrian Coalition Week] was by no means Schlingensief’s first project in Austria. That honor goes to the play Hurra, Jesus! Ein Hochkampf [Hurray, Jesus! A Fight], which premiered on September 30, 1995, as a co-production of the United Stages of Graz and the Steirischer Herbst, an interna- tional festival for contemporary art held every fall in the Styrian capital. The Graz audience seems to have enjoyed Schlingen- sief’s humorous attack on the Church. They invited him to back to the Steirischer Herbst three years later to mount an Austrian follow-up to the highly controversial Chance 2000 action he had run in the lead-up to the German federal election of 1998.3 For Chance 2000, Schlingensief had “founded a political party with the aim of supporting disabled, unemployed, and other mar- ginalized people to become independent electoral candidates” (Forrest and Scheer 2010, 10). The medial highpoint of this ac- tion was the invitation to go Baden im Wolfgangsee [Bathing in Lake Wolfgang], a well-known summer holiday destination not far from Salzburg. Schlingensief invited all six-million German unemployed (and the number six million is not innocent in the German context as it is the number of Jews exterminated in the Holocaust) to join him on August 2 on the shores of the lake in Sankt Gilgen next to Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s cottage and to all jump in at the same time to raise the lake level and flood said cottage (“Chance 2000 – Partei der letzten Chance 3 That he had in the intervening three years scored major hits with Rocky Dutschke, ’68 (1996), Mein Filz, mein Fett, mein Hase! [My Felt, My Fat, My Hare!] (1997), Passion Impossible: 7 Tage Notruf für Deutschland [Passion Impossible: 7 Day Emergency Call for Germany] (1997), and the television program Talk 2000, as well as a score of theater productions speaks to Schlingensief’s extraordinary productivity.