Page - 137 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

137 from grand Hotels to tiny treasures tive and forward-looking. Even in storage objects now have rea- son to look forward to future display with other recognized and unrecognized treasures. Learning from Semmering How do the grand hotels in and around Vienna measure up to Anderson’s filmic and curatorial visions? What does their fu- turity look like? How are these worlds of yesterday managing and what kinds of futures are they making possible? Here The Grand Budapest Hotel is useful in drawing attention to the fact that grand hotels differ somewhat according to their location. Made possible by the nineteenth-century development of the railway and the holding of world exhibitions, which created “obvious needs for greatly increased lodging space (Denby 1998, 81), grand hotels arose once “the idea of living in palatial rooms at will and without responsibilities had caught the imagination of the well-to-do” (ibid., 102). While they tended to be located “beside, or were attached to, the great railway stations of every major European city” as well as “at the distant ends of the rail- way lines, on the coast and in the mountains, where they ca- tered to those seeking bodily and spiritual renewal in pure air, clean waters, ‘untouched’ landscape, the sublime grandeur of the mountains or the sea” (Lachmayer et al. 1991, 33), in Vienna grand hotels developed not in conjunction with the railroads but rather the ring boulevard that was built beginning in 1858 to replace the glacis, the military parade grounds that surrounded the first district. The grand hotels Denby lists in her study — the Imperial, which was built in 1867 to be Duke Philippe of Würt- tenberg’s palace but was never used for that purpose and was converted to a hotel six years later for Vienna’s one and only World Exhibition; the Metropole, which was built in 1873 ex- plicitly for that world exhibition; the Britannia, which was com- pleted in 1870; the Donau, which was built from 1870 to 1880; and the Hotel Sacher, which was developed by the enterprising butcher Eduard Sacher, who in 1880 purchased “the site where the old Kärntnertor Theatre had been replaced by a new build-