Page - 125 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

125 from grand Hotels to tiny treasures surviving Jugendstil department store in Germany,” which had closed in 2009 (ibid., 66, 67, 69).3 Görlitz proved to be exactly the type of ravaged, Eastern Eu- ropean location Anderson was looking for. A small city in Ger- many’s easternmost district on the German-Polish border, close to the Czech Republic and less than three hours by car from the Babelsberg Studio in Potsdam, where the American-German co-production was based, it was ideally suited to Anderson’s purposes because the quirks of history first allowed it to develop and then prevented its outright destruction while at the same time providing it with considerable patina: “[i]t was beyond the range of the RAF [Royal Air Force] (who gave it the code name Nautilus) and thus not subject to the devastating firebombing meted out to other German cities” (ibid., 68).4 While one arti- cle drily claimed that “Armut ist der beste Denkmalschützer” [“poverty is the best preserver of monuments”] (Heinz 2015), Görlitz has only been poor since it escaped the decimation of nearby Dresden during World War II. Before that, because of its cloth production and location on the ancient and medieval trade route known as the Via Regia, it was a very prosperous town, which is how it came to have the impressive historic in- frastructure it does (Firebrace 2014, 68). Görlitz managed to en- ter the twenty-first century “as though on an ark” with around 4000 “Baudenkmale” [“monumental buildings”] (Heinz 2015), including: [R]emarkable medieval churches and towers, an unusual full-scale reproduction of the Holy Tomb in Jerusalem and a large number of Renaissance and baroque palaces and streets. To the south of the centre is a sizeable nineteenth- century extension, with wide streets, tree-filled squares and 3 Given that Berlin’s Kaufhaus des Westens, which opened in 1907, six years before the Görlitz Kaufhaus, still exists, what I take Firebrace to be claim- ing here is that the Görlitz Kaufhaus is the only one not to have experi- enced extensive damage and restoration. 4 That it was not located in an alpine setting was not a factor, given Ander- son’s propensity for interiors and fantasy landscapes.