Page - 114 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

114 siting futurity He asks where Doft is going, how he will spend the evening, what he will have for dinner. Soup, hamburger, mashed potatoes and stewed fruit comes the reply. Homemade stewed fruit? Oh yes, always, Doft responds, and also a small Ottakringer beer for 4 Schilling 90, at which Alam remarks, smirking and looking at the cameraperson: “Oh, Preis muss man unbedingt wissen” [“oh, one must absolutely know the price”]. When his “joke” flops with those present, he goes to assure everyone that they are “gute Nachbarn, das ist wichtig, sehr gute Nachbarn” [“good neighbors, that is important, very good neighbors”]. Doft re- sponds, “[j]a, ja, ich glaube, ich bin ein guter Nachbar” [“yes, yes, I think I’m a good neighbor”], implying that he’s not so sure about Alam. He grabs Alam‘s hand and wishes him good health and praises Alam’s responding wish of “alles Gute” [“all the best”] with “[i]n Ordung” [“ok”], something Alam doesn’t quite get. He turns to the camera people and asks them, “[w]as soll das bedeuten?” [“what does that mean?”], as the camera follows Doft walking away down the street and the credits roll. While in Jenseits des Kriegs [The Other Side of War] (1995), Beckermann set out to “examine why veterans and other Austrians of the war generation visit an exhibition of material that indicts them in the strongest terms” (D. Lorenz 1999, 323), here she depicts an everyday encounter of a Holocaust survivor and a more recent anti-Semitic immigrant businessman to show how Jews manage to live with everyday racism that wears a friendly face. In doing so she reveals both how much the FPÖ’s blanket condemnation of “foreigners” misses the mark and the terrible irony that some of those foreigners are likely their supporters. A New Stage While there is no evidence to suggest that Schlingensief took on board the lessons of Beckermann’s documentary, or that he could even understand its difficult, local dialect had he watched it, when he next returned to perform in Austria, with the world premiere of the anti-Iraq-War play Bambiland at the Burg theater on December 12, 2003, it marked a decisive development in his