Page - 141 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

141 from grand Hotels to tiny treasures sentative Thomas Schellenbacher. In the meantime, charges of illegal hiring of construction workers have been laid, among other scandals (Wammerl 2017). At the time of writing, the Pan- hans remains under construction. In the summer of 2017, it was unable to participate in the Kultur Sommer Semmering festival, which has been taking place since 2011 to attract audiences from Vienna and Graz from July through September with a cultural program that features literary, musical, and culinary events that bring in funds while at the same time helping to maintain the increasingly rickety structures through use. In the summer of 2019, the Kurhaus joined in Panhans in not being able to par- ticipate in Kultur Sommer Semmering due to the exorbitant de- mands of its Kazakh owners, something festival director Flo- rian Krumpöck personally regretted and found unnecessary, although he tried to put a positive spin on the new program possibilities that would be offered by having the Südbahn hotel as the festival’s sole venue (Rosenberger 2019). The influence “[w]er heute eine Rast am Semmering riskiert, bedauert das triste Ambiente” [“those who dare to make a stop in Semmering regret its sad atmosphere”] (Urbanek 2019). When viewed in light of Semmering’s recent history, it is clear that Wes Anderson left off his grand hotel’s story just as it was set to enter the age of global finance capitalism. As Frank details, the invention of the Alpine sanatoria, which she trans- lates as air cure towns, did not take place in Semmering but in Davos, thanks to Alexander Spengler, a law student who had led a student rebellion in Mannheim in March 1848 and then fled to the Swiss alps to avoid arrest (Frank 2012, 186). Long associated with Thomas Mann’s 1924 Zauberberg [Magic Mountain], Davos is now better known as the site of the invitation-only annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), which prides it- self on bringing together the chief executive officers of its 1,000 member companies with movers and shakers in the world of politics, academia, religion, and the media. The kind of future that these annual gatherings at the end of January work towards is obviously very much in the rapacious spirit of the capitalism that developed Davos and other air cure towns with grand ho-