Page - 105 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

105 Hardly Homemad(e) the Turks.6 While the Mariensäule has been moved about a fair amount in its more than 300-year existence (it was previously on the Karmeliter and Jakomini squares), it has been at the Iron Gate since 1928, long enough to become a fixture on postcards. While it is difficult to ascertain what role the Holy Maria’s pres- ence on top of the column overlooking Schlingensief’s shenani- gans played in the far right taking offence to the performance, the FPÖ nevertheless took its lead from the column’s reputation as a bastion of Christendom and did its best to put a stop to the performance, collecting 10,000 signatures with that de- mand. Schlingensief counterattacked by threatening to occupy their party headquarters in the Griesplatz on the other side of the river, a less than fifteen-minute walk from the Mariensäule, something he was prevented from doing by the mobilization of twelve police officers. The resulting coverage in the German- language press demonstrated Schlingensief’s prowess in mak- ing his opponents look ridiculous (“Christoph Schlingensief, Chance 2000 für Graz” 1998). It also provided Schlingensief with a target and a template for his next major Austrian action.7 The Main (Container) Event After the major loss suffered by Helmut Kohl’s CDU in the 1998 election, the Austrian election the following year on October 3, 1999 was hotly anticipated, and it did not disappoint. Since 1986 Austria had been governed by a coalition of the Sozialdemo- kratische Partei Österreichs (SPÖ) and its junior partner, the Ös- terreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP), and the share of the extreme- right populist FPÖ had grown from 5% to 27%, mainly due to its charismatic leader, Jörg Haider. During the 1999 election cam- paign, the leader of the ÖVP (since 1995), Wolfgang Schüssel, at- 6 See the entry for “Graz, Marien- oder Türkensäule” on the Türk- engedächtnis [Turkish commemoration] website for details (Türk- engedächtnis). 7 His skewering the institution of psychoanalysis in Schnitzler’s Brain at the Schauspielhaus Graz in May 2000 was not as major as his outdoor events of this period (“Schnitzler’s Brain – Freiheit für Alles” 2000).