Seite - 47 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

47 (re)forming Vienna’s culture of resistance [Who writes history? Every morning when we go to work, a new page is written in the history books. Who writes it? Does history happen to us? Or do we make our own history? Our history is the history of struggles, between the classes, an angry chronology. Yet we are taught a long list of crowns and thrones, governed by a blind fate. When we are not supposed to learn that much — who benefits from our not knowing? When so much isn’t in the schoolbooks, who doesn’t want what to be taught?] (Unger 2015, 13) With questions like these in the air, the city should not have been surprised that its plans to demolish the slaughterhouse met with the resistance it did. On the afternoon of June 27, 1976, a Sunday and the day of the final Arena performance that season, the Schmetterlinge and a cabaret group called Keif performed at an Anti-Schleif- er (anti-razing) event at the Naschmarkt.11 At the end of their performance they called for the rescue of the slaughterhouse as well. Hundreds spontaneously headed to St. Marx, where Schabernack II, a musical protesting the highway by the group 11 As Friesenbichler relates (2008, 108–9), Schleifer is an ambiguous term in German, referring to the tearing down of buildings but also to a sadistic drill sergeant. The protest was multi-pronged and in the first instance against scandals in the army. First to break had been the case of Kurt Wandl, an eighteen year old doing military service, who collapsed and died on August 15, 1974, during a drill involving heavy equipment carried out on one of the hottest days of the year. Journalists soon discovered it was not an isolated case, and when in May 1976 another incident was reported in the Rennbahnexpress, a magazine for young people, of a near- death (Werner Grusch barely survived punishment for complaining about the exorbitant prices in the cantine and collapsed after an hour and a half of carrying gas masks around), a protest was called for that overlapped with the one against the planned highway. Grusch also appeared on the protest’s program.