Seite - 41 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

41 (re)forming Vienna’s culture of resistance Occupying Vienna3 In the post-World War II reconstruction period known as the Wiederaufbau, Austria’s Social-Democratic Party (Sozial- demokratische Partei Österreichs, SPÖ) had a stronghold in Vienna but not at the federal level, where they were part of a coalition with the conservative Austrian People’s Party (Öster- reichische Volkspartei, ÖVP). During the period 1966–70, the conservatives gained a majority at the federal level for the first time since the occupying powers, led by the Soviet Union, had officially left Austria in 1955. 1968 has been nicknamed the “tame revolution” by Austrian historians, which, given that some pro- test events featured the Actionists who specialized in a politics of transgression involving acts such as defecating on the public stages of university auditoria, gives one an idea what is consid- 3 One could translate besetzen into English with either “occupy” or “squat.” Sedlmaier, like many others, opts for the latter in his definition of it as “the unauthorised occupation of abandoned buildings” (Sedlmaier 2014, 208). The question of that authority is made more transparent in the online Oxford dictionary’s definition of “to squat”: “unlawfully occupy (an un- inhabited building).” Because this understanding renders any such action necessarily illegal, thereby acquiescing to the sanctity of private property, I prefer to speak of “occupation,” which is admittedly not an unproblematic term. As mentioned in the Preface to this book, the students who occupied the Senate Chamber during the 2018 York strike favored the term “reclaim” over “occupy” to emphasize their claims to the space as students and because of their discomfort with the colonial implications of occupation relevant in their local context. Similarly, as Ann Kaun notes in her study of the Occupy Stockholm and Occupy Latvia movements, one of the aims of the Latvian movement was to reclaim the notion of occupation itself: “[a] s reason why no Occupy encampment emerged in Latvia after 2011, two of my informants suggested that the name Occupy did not appeal to citizens and potential activists, given Latvia’s occupation by Germany and the Soviet Union in the first half of the twentieth century. In that sense, one of the Occupy movement’s main aims, namely, to overturn and reclaim the notion of occupation, failed in the Latvian context” (2017, 138). It is in the spirit of reclaiming occupation and the welcome political connotations it acquired during the 2011 protest actions, which emphasize the space itself and its contested use value, that I favor it over “squat.”