Page - 129 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

129 from grand Hotels to tiny treasures their homes. Given that identity is constructed in and through place, the shrinking city phenomenon is to be expected, as peo- ple leave places they no longer want to be associated with. Like sex workers, Görlitzers have fought back against their stigma- tization by taking pride in their work and in the success of the films made there: “[a]ls bei der Oscarverleihung 2015 der Streif- en The Grand Budapest Hotel den Goldjungen gleich vierfach erhielt, unter anderem für das beste Szenenbild, knallten auch in Görlitz die Sektkorken.” [“When in 2015 The Grand Budapest Hotel received four gold statues, among them for best produc- tion design, the sekt corks also popped in Görlitz”] (Heinz 2015). Ruin porn works, then, by creating what Apel calls an “de- industrial sublime” that acts to temper anxiety about decline by containing it aesthetically and locating it elsewhere. Places such as Detroit and the Grand Budapest Hotel in Anderson’s film serve as “a geographic repository for society’s irreconcilable emotions about the present and future of capitalism” (Steacy 2016, 255). If we recall that the title and set of Anderson’s film locate it firmly in a failed Eastern Europe, then it behooves us to recognize that this failure is by no means a thing of the past and that, as Agata Pyzik eloquently argues in her 2014 Poor But Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West, there is a pressing need to “take stock of the myths, stereotypes, and ‘great narratives’ of the Cold War that [continue to] haunt East-West cultural rela- tions today” (Zychowicz 2015, 155). After “exploring the plight of young people under socialism against the backdrop of the years after the more recent economic collapse of 2008,” (ibid., 156), she declares: So yes, the East is still more beastly than the West, but per- haps it has become more so during the “transition,” finally fulfilling all of the negative stereotypes the West had about it while it was ruled by its decaying communist parties […] The dissolution of communism in the countries involved led to a social desert, in which people are more than others im- mersed in a capitalist “state of nature.” (Pyzik 2014, 3–4)