Page - 144 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

144 siting futurity a former ’68er turned corporate shill, who puts their revolution- ary principles to a test. Released in the year the eu enlarged by ten countries, most from behind what had been the Iron Cur- tain, Hans Weingart ner’s smash hit was celebrated as a welcome repoliticization of German filmmaking for a new generation and part of a larger turn in German cinema towards social and political issues.1 Sabine Hake spoke of “an emerging cinema of dissent” in the “new Germany” that found itself in a “unified Europe” (Hake 2008, 192; italics added) and listed Weingart ner among several socially conscious directors — some of them trained or born in the GDR — [who] have enlisted the social and cul- tural topographies of post-unification Berlin in diagnosing the failures of reunification [… and t]he affinities between established subcultures and the new urban underclass. (Hake 2008, 220) For his part Eric Rentschler, who included Weingart ner in a group with Angela Schanelec, Almut Getto Moore, Benjamin Quabeck, Hans Christian Schmidt, Andreas Kleinert, Andreas Dresen, Oskar Roehler, Fatih Akin, and Tom Tykwer, was also very positive about German cinema’s prospects in the new mil- lennium, writing that: “Contemporary German films, at long last, once again manifest an ability to take risks, to dare to be spontaneous and tentative. By illuminating obscured spaces and respecting marginal perspectives, they seek to expand our re- gard both for what is real and what might be possible” (Rent- schler 2002, 5; italics added). It is difficult to capture Weingart- ner’s goals as a filmmaker more precisely. Yet whenever scholars compare his work to others, they invariably end up noting that he “sets himself apart not only from other contemporary Ger- 1 This trend has received attention in a number of survey works, such as Cooke (2012) and the second edition of Hake (2008), and edited collec- tions: Fisher and Prager (2010), Cooke and Homewood (2011), Mueller and Skidmore (2012), and Nagib and Jerslev (2013).