Page - 157 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

157 capitalism, scHizopHrenia, and #Vanlife the gentrification he has watched overtake Berlin over his past fifteen years in the city. To conclude, I would like to question whether, or in how far, this stance can properly be described as nostalgic. It seems quite a commonplace in German film scholarship to catego- rize The Edukators as “another quirky, nostalgic, social satire” (Cliffe 2005; italics added) and to include it as part of the cy- cle of Ost- and Westalgie films produced at the beginning of the new millennium (H. Farr 2011), of which Goodbye Lenin! (2003, dir. Wolfgang Becker), which also featured Daniel Brühl and Burghard Klaußner, has come to be seen as paradigmatic. Ac- cording to Alexandra Ludewig, “in the wake of the fundamental social and psychological changes affecting German citizens east and west of the disappearing Wall since 1989 — which has given rise to a sense of crisis that has provoked a sense of nostalgia of sorts for the disappearing GDR as well as the old FRG — a long- ing for Heimat has found expression in German film produc- tion” (Ludewig 2014, 435). If anything, Weingart ner’s films are more appropriately classed as Ostalgie rather than Westalgie, as Sabine Hake implicitly perceived, which only serves to draw at- tention to the problems with the lives that actually existed on both sides of the Wall. Rather than nostalgia what the film en- gages in is Vergangenheitsbewältigung, coming to terms with the past so that one can move on: “In a bid to move beyond legacies left by older generations, the film shows the characters negotiat- ing feelings of guilt and perpetration during a journey into the Austrian Alps” (H. Farr 2011). Weingart ner’s type of return to the past is not nostalgic but a very rational Auseinandersetzung, a real engagement, with it.7 7 To include Weingart ner in those that “responded to the erosion of old patterns of understanding and the ideological restructuring of Central Eu- rope through the use of narratives which — beyond science and rational- ity — centre of the mythical to explain the new German order” as Ludewig does (2014, 435) would seem to indicate that she sees Marxism as a myth. It is a pity she does not explore this point in more detail.