Page - 145 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

145 capitalism, scHizopHrenia, and #Vanlife man filmmakers but also from his generation of fellow Germans in general” (Cook 2010, 310; italics added) and that his early hit “represents something of a departure from some of the other re- lated films” and has “a somewhat different attitude to its critical reckoning with German society” (Palfreyman 2011, 172; italics added) as it “suggests that resistance might be possible in the real world rather than only within the framework of the kind of countercultural discourses cinema can construct” (Leal 2012, 129). By this point in the book, not to mention the italics in the previous paragraph, astute readers will suspect, if they don’t al- ready know, that Weingart ner is not German. Indeed, he is from Feldkirch in the westernmost part of Vorarlberg on the border to Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Yet typically this fact is rel- egated to the category of “I know but all the same,” as in Roger Cook’s comment that “Although Austrian by birth, the direc- tor Hans Weingart ner belongs to this genus of recent German filmmakers” that have shifted towards the mainstream of rep- resentational narrative cinema as it has been propagated glob- ally by the Hollywood film industry (Cook 2010, 310). In paying attention to Weingart ner’s political sensitivity to location, this chapter situates him among those who have absorbed the spa- tial lessons Vienna’s fraught cultural historical landscape makes available, something that could well have happened during his time studying at the University of Vienna.2 I am not contest- ing the fact that The Edukators “engages with the history of the Federal Republic, and indeed with German film history” (Pal- freyman 2011, 171). Rather, I seek to locate the coordinates of 2 According to Roger Cook, “After studying physics and computer science and conducting brain research at the University of Vienna, he studied film and television at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln (1997–2001)” (Cook 2010, 310). Weingart ner himself described what he studied in Vi- enna as “Neurowissenschaften” [neurological studies] (Weingart ner 2012). He also earned a diploma as a camera assistant from the Austrian Associa- tion of Cinematography. No doubt his time living in a squat in Berlin in the 1990s also had something to do with his politicization, especially in conjunction with his studies in a Vienna in which Jörg Haider’s presence was starting to make itself felt (see Fiddler 2018).