Page - 126 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

126 siting futurity large houses with ample flats modelled after Berlin. Görlitz has the air of the perfect miniature city, furnished with one each of all the requisite building types, seemingly borrowed from somewhere else but reduced in scale — the railway sta- tion with its vaulted duck-egg blue ceiling, the crenellated post office that looks like a toy castle, the diminutive natural history museum with its collection of local snakes and rep- tiles. In addition to the Kaufhaus, Görlitz has a wide array of Jugendstil buildings, dating from its boom years in the early twentieth century, including the only surviving Jugendstil synagogue (the interior was burnt out by the Nazis but has since been restored), the large Stadthalle by the river, the Church of the Holy Cross, with a tower that seems to belong to a power station and various large residences such as the exotic Villa Ephraim in Goethestrasse. (Firebrace 2014, 68) Despite these treasures, its more recent history has been one of privation and shrinkage: “There is little left today of Görlitz’s pre-1989 industry, as state-subsidised factories have been as- set-stripped and closed. The population has dropped to half its pre-war figure, from 100,000 to 50,000, with many of the younger inhabitants having to move west for education and em- ployment” (Firebrace 2014, 69). It is not surprising that the city has been happy to reinvent itself as a film set: “Able without too much cosmetic scenery to transform itself into various other cities, it has stood in for Paris in Around the World in Eighty Days, for a Sicilian town in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, and for any number of other German cities in The Reader, The Book Thief and various TV films” (Firebrace 2014, 69).5 Görlitz thus finds itself having to walk a tightrope similar to the one we will see Hallstatt confronted with in the concluding chapter. Just as Hallstatt’s natural beauty is threatened by the masses of Asian tourists attracted to that beauty, so too is the faded glamor that makes Görlitz attractive to the film industry in danger of being changed beyond recognition by the atten- 5 IMDB lists fifty-one productions made in Görlitz.