by Luke Bennett
Bunkers are structures which are ‘known’ for both their brutal physical expression in concrete and their powerful dark resonance in language and imagery: as the site of ‘bunker mentality’ (Bennett 2011a). During the Cold War bunkers were exceptional spaces, in which extreme and exceptional things were enabled (Klinke 2015, 2016). They were fundamental, existential places: places of life and death, a conflation of womb and tomb (Beck 2011). The word ‘bunker’ therefore has powerful connotations: it exists in both the landscapes of the mind and those of the earth. It also straddles the realms of fact and fiction: for bunkers are places most of the time encountered more in fiction than reality, simultaneously figured in popular culture as a place of ultimate control and a place of abject defeat. Thus, in many ways ‘the bunker’ is a phenomenon for which we know more about the image than the reality, and yet the bunker’s ideational state and its materiality are co-productive: ideas shape the evolution of the bunker form, but the possibilities are limited by physical realities of the engineering properties and costs of their construction (Bennett 2011a). As Nadia Bartolini (2015) has emphasized, ultimately a bunker is just a chamber – it is what we (or others) do within it that makes these places matter; thus bunkers express and embody a ‘social materiality’ (Dale 2005), and our bunker hunting journey in this book needs to take us both to bunker places and to bunker ideas.
In the chapters that follow we will encounter a wide variety of places which fall within the OED’s broad definition of bunkers, ranging from the monolithic remains of the Nazi Atlantic Wall encountered in France during the Cold War, street corner pillboxes in Albania, defensive tunnels in Taiwan, fortified subways in the Netherlands, a modified mountaintop in Norway, adapted caves and a secret governmental complex in the US, ROC Posts and regional command bunkers in the UK and demolition charge stores in Germany. In doing so our contributors will take us to the frontiers at which the ‘everywhere war’ of the Cold War was most concentrated: ‘Cold War Europe’, ‘Nuclear America’ and ‘Asia’s Cold War Archipelago’ (Lowe & Joel 2013, 14), and beyond – for the Cold War’s reach (and its stationing of bunkers) was truly global.
But this book is only incidentally an account of the 20th-century origins, designs and geo-political histories of the Cold War’s bunkers and their dissemination (cf. Mallory & Ottar 1973; McCamley 2007; Osborne 2008). As part of the ‘Place, Memory, Affect’ series, this book investigates the ways in which the physical remains of now-abandoned Cold War bunkers become the totems and sites of memory, improvisation and engagement for a wide variety of disciplines, practices and visitors, and as such the book’s central concern is with practices of meaning making as they are applied to Cold War bunkers now, in the early 21st century. More particularly it is about how different groups of people valorize (or seek to ignore) the remains of these now-abandoned prosaic structures. In other words, to ask ‘why – and how – do some people ascribe significance to these now abandoned places?’. We will consider this a little further shortly, but must first digress to consider the question of whether we can properly call abandoned bunkers ‘ruins’.
ARE BUNKERS RUINS?
The past ten years have seen the revival of interest in ruins as subject of study and popular engagement (DeSilvey & Edensor 2013; Dillon 2011, 2014). But the ‘New Ruins’ (Martin 2014) that are the focal point of this Ruinenlust revival are the remnants of recently abandoned factories, shopping centres or military sites: thus Tim Edensor (2005) writes convincingly of aesthetic engagements with industrial ruins, Owen Hatherley (2011) takes us on a tour of The New Ruins of Britain wrought by neoliberalism – the recently failed schemes of malls, apartment blocks and civic architecture – and Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (2010) gather 24 commentators to analyse the Ruins of Modernity, ranging across bombed buildings, colonial outposts and the relics of Modernist ambition. None of these works is strictly addressing a form of dereliction that counts as ‘ruin’ according to the principles of classical ruin aesthetics. And it is by this measure that Paul Hirst (2005) writes that abandoned bunkers should not be called ruins – for unlike castles they are not heroic structures which are softened or incorporated into nature by the passage of time. For Hirst, the simple fact of redundancy (that a bunker – like a mall, a factory or a municipal building – has been abandoned because it no longer has a use) doesn’t make it a ruin.
Exceptionally, Caitlin DeSilvey (2014) has been able to claim the abandoned bunker remains of the Orford Ness military testing range in Suffolk (UK) as ruins in a way that Hirst would accept, by showing how the National Trust (who took over the site in 1993) applied classical ruin aesthetics in order to decide the curatorial strategy for this place’s Cold War remains. The Trust, keen to balance the competing demands of nature conservation and the preservation of the Cold War heritage represented by the site’s bunkers, decided upon a policy of ‘palliative curation’ (DeSilvey 2014) in which processes of natural ruination were allowed to continue, the resulting ‘slow implosion’ of these structures seeing their ‘invasion by the benign forces of owls and gulls, roots and rust, wind and sea swell’ (80). Through this bunker ruination, ‘manufactured materials are slowing, losing their physical integrity, as they are actively enrolled in the process of becoming archaeological. The ragged seam between nature and culture unravels and, finally, dissolves’ (86). Thus, through the agency of the natural world acting upon the body of this iconic site’s abandoned military structures, a dynamic which accesses the classical ruin model is established: that a structure is falling back into a state of nature, the frailties of modernist confidence thereby unsettled, and revealed as hubris. For DeSilvey, the act of decay also reasserts the material existence and independence of the non-human, thus asserting a non-symbolic quality. Thus, the ruin does not just signify the ‘fall of man’ (and/or the finitude of all human projects). It also reminds us that the world is made up of a multitude of vibrant actors – animal, mineral and vegetal, acting out their processes in the extant realm of the material, rather than the culturally mediated realm of the semiotic. Although – of course – the ivy can creep its encroaching course only if the manager of the site decides – deliberatively – not to resist it.
Elsewhere Mette Haakonsen has suggested something approaching the picturesque for the landscapes formed by the Nazi bunkers of the Atlantic Wall (2009, 98), whereby ‘the bunkers enhance the inherent aesthetic qualities of landscape and weather…. The sand, the dunes, the lime grass and the sea, the sun, the wind and the rain – the beauty and the force of nature – appear more clearly when set in contrast to bunkers, and influence the senses and performance of the visitor’. Something then demonstrated in the-bunker-in-atmospheric-landscape photographs of Marc Wilson’s The Last Stand (2014) collection.
But these are exceptions – most bunkers (and particularly those pertaining to the Cold War era) are drab in appearance, suburban in location, mostly underground and not romantically offset by filigree and shadow. Therefore, we have the choice either of separating out the minority of compliantly ruinous structures and calling only these ‘ruins’ or instead adopting an ethnographic position, one which accepts as ‘ruins’ whatever contemporary audiences refer to by that name. The latter position is taken in this book, as there seems little to be gained in preserving a purist definition of ruins. Indeed, a fixation on reasserting painterly aesthetic considerations in framing the categorization of ruins downplays the qualifying importance of another feature attributed to the classical ruin: namely that the contemporary remains of the Cold War’s former structures provide at least as much of a provocation to the spectator, to reflect upon the vagaries of hubris, power and mortality as did the ‘classical’ ruins of Imperial Rome when rediscovered by Renaissance philosophers.
IS THE BUNKER KNOWABLE?
This book is written at a time when academic interest in materiality – the ‘stuffness’ of the world – is in the ascendant (see, for example, Bennett 2010; Hodder 2012). The bunker is intimately associated with a
material (concrete); indeed bunker and concrete are almost synonymous (Forty 2012). Furthermore, the recent material ‘turn’ has emphasized the affective properties of matter – the ability for matter to act vibrantly upon our sense and our lives (Bennett 2010). However, while bunkers’ spatial and material properties do somewhat condition human action, the practices by which we choose to make and circulate meaning for such places must remain a core part of any analysis of their effect and significance. As Nadia Bartolini (2015) has argued, it is us humans who make the bunker speak. Thus, this book will approach affect (our sensorial and emotional response to such places and the thoughts and feeling that they trigger) and materiality (our relationship with matter itself) as co-constitutive: as important but integral parts of our meaning making (here following variously: Wenger 1998; Geoghegan 2009; Miller 2009; Hodder 2012; Wetherell 2012), rather than existing as alternative human forms of engagement with place that somehow escape any relationship to cultural patterning and discursive transmission (cf. here Thrift 2007 and cultural geography’s ‘Non Representational Theory’).
Writing from the perspective of the poststructuralist anxieties about the ‘crisis of representation’ and the limits of language, John Beck (2011, 98) suggests that abandoned bunkers are incapable of ‘cultural recuperation’ and that they present an awkward and anomalous relict feature in the landscapes in which they once operated. This collection will revisit Beck’s thesis and explore the ways in which meanings (and some measure of cultural recuperation) are made through valorization of these structures by artists, archaeologists, amateur bunker hunters, urban explorers and the former occupants of these facilities. The reader will learn of those who apply intensive effort in the hope that – like Aladdin’s cave – with determined effort ‘their’ bunker will reveal its secrets to them, and meet some who hope for recuperation within the bunker. Elsewhere the bunker will appear as a stage, a void within which fading geopolitical nightmares were once rehearsed, but which now present as an atmospheric (dark) canvas onto which to project contemporary fixations.
The bunker will never entirely escape its dark affective power, and the collection does not deny that thrall. But above all, the collection attests to the mutability of the bunker – for even though it is a place-type (and a set of ideas about form, defence and power) that typifies solidity, it is susceptible to the chemicals of war and weathering, the exigencies of politics, the vagaries of time and memory and the pragmatic improvisations of those who co-opt these relics into their practices. This complex of effects confounds all attempts to singularly control the bunker’s use, fate or its (dis)appearance. This will be the heartland of the contributions: the bunker’s multivalence, and progressively this book will reveal itself to be as interested in the ruination of the identity of the Cold War bunker, as it is with the material decay of those structures themselves.
This book is a further instalment in my exploration of how a variety of communities make sense of bunker-remains. As such it is a challenge to writers like Beck who have contended that bunkers somehow lie beyond the possibility of any stable representation. Towards the end of his semi-fictional travelogue, Rings of Saturn (2002), W. G. Sebald approached the pagoda-like structures at Orford Ness. On that otherwise-remote and barren shingle spit, Sebald claims that he struggled to make sense of what he saw before him: ‘Where and in what time I was that day at Orford Ness I cannot say, even as I write these words’ (2002, 237). In oft-quoted passages Sebald has bequeathed a powerful – and culturally dominant – view of abandoned Cold War bunkers, foregrounding their other-worldliness, malevolent purpose, and presenting them as a posthuman index of apocalypse. Sebald’s struggle to find words to make sense of what he saw both alludes to a nuclear sublime and a wider crisis of representation that haunted post-modern writers, and John Beck summates this line of bunker-thinking in his Concrete Ambivalence thesis (Beck 2011), which asserts that bunkers resist stable representation or understanding – that they cannot be ‘accurately or adequately [assigned] an unambiguous meaning’ (2011, 83). Here Beck is adopting Zygmunt Bauman’s conceptualization of ambivalence as a state of acute discomfort arising when modernity cannot ‘accurately or adequately [assign] an unambiguous meaning’ (Beck 2011, 83) to something. Beck finds this ambivalence in modern culture’s understanding of the bunker, as an aberrant phenomenon ‘that resists assimilation’ (2011, 81), given the bunker’s ‘disturbing and relentless oscillation between life and death, ruin and rubble, nature and culture, exposure and concealment, image and object, art and atrocity, that reverberates deep in the rebars of the bunker’s reinforced concrete’ (2011, 98). For Beck this tremor of modernity’s ambivalence, as expressed in the body of the bunker, is something that ‘no amount of cultural recuperation can, or should, contain’ (2011, 98).
In Concrete Multivalence, my 2013 counter to Beck’s thesis, I explained how my research has explored the formation and operation of modes of relatively stable forms of representation, used by amateur bunker hunters to render abandoned bunkers ‘meaningful’, in particular pointing out (Bennett 2011b, 2013a, 2013b) how one variant of bunker-hunting is a highly systematic and methodical ‘bunkerology’, which uses the methods and language of archaeology and surveying to ‘record’ and categorize bunker-forms as a taxonomic hobby practice (see, for example, the published bunkerology of McCamley 2007; Osborne 2008). In short, viewed ethnographically, the crisis of representation as it applied to bunkers appears to be confined to a creative writers and literary theorists, and does not hamper amateur enthusiasts. But, while I believe that writers like Beck have been too strident in declaring the impossibility of establishing representational schema for bunkers, I do accept that the bunker is an awkward phenomenon to ‘capture’ and render fixed with language and other forms of representation. The meaning making explored in this collection is certainly not found to be effortless or closed, but rather that it is the very effortfulness that makes it – and the logics and practices sustained by it – both detectable and worthy of study. In short, the bunker’s particular awkwardness gives us an opportunity to examine how multiple meanings are created and circulated for modern ruins. In my studies (Bennett 2011b, 2013a, 2013b) I explored both the sophistication and the patterning of bunker hunters’ meaning-making practices. Alongside the taxonomic, I characterized three other general modes of bunker representation: the experiential, the political and the nostalgic and showed by reference to case study examples how each discursive formation framed the bunker. I argued that an account of a bunker-hunting endeavour will tend to align to one of these modes of representation, but that it may also interlace the concerns or stylistics of other forms as an ancillary, enhancing its impact in doing so. I also argued that through the circulation and enforcement of bunker representations that conform to one or other of these modes, a bunker-aesthetics is reinforced through which initiates learn how to participate in communities of enthusiasts who engage with these now-abandoned structures.
I have argued (Bennett 2013a) that bunker-hunting has its roots in the anti-nuclear protest movement and that thus bunker-hunting starts in the mode of political reconnaissance. A nostalgic form can also be identified (and it is particularly apparent in relation to engagements with the bunkers of the First and Second World Wars). Finally, an experiential mode of bunker-hunting is more recent: the abandonment of Cold War military structures during the 1990s coincided with the birth of both heritage tourism and urban exploration as contemporary pastimes. For urban exploration, abandoned Cold War bunkers were simply the next available frontier to penetrate and explore (and as a natural follow-on to the industrial and institutional buildings abandoned in the 1980s). Both heritage and urban exploration have the ability to imbue seemingly worthless, abandoned places with newfound significance and attraction (and which may (or may not) be triggered by a link to memory or prior experience).
In each of these forms of bunker-hunting, abandoned bunkers are revealed as pieces of a (once) secret history, now available to
be pieced together, puzzle-like, via a:
zeroing in on the thing that I didn’t know I needed, [this practice] confirms me as a paid up enthusiast for unofficial history: rumours of nuclear bunkers beneath Essex farms, deserted hospitals, ghosts of suburbia … sites, come upon by accident, [that] prick our imagination, provoke reverie. (Sinclair 2009, 4)
And this testimonial from contemporary psychogeographer Iain Sinclair fittingly appeared in his foreword to an April 2009 Guardian weekend supplement’s action-oriented guide entitled Secret Britain: Hundreds of hidden things to see and do. This compulsive piece-hunting may simply be a product of an over-stimulation identified by Walter Benjamin as at the heart of modernity: thus bunker-hunting may be seen as a manifestation of ‘the blasé individual, craving stimulation and simultaneously unresponsive to it, [who] embarks on a spiralling and inevitably fruitless quest for novelty’ (Gilloch 1997, 172) with the bunker hunter seeking to reconstruct and defend a meaningfulness for his life and place by the ‘religious accumulation of personal accounts, documents, images and all the visible signs of what used to be’ (Augé 1995, 25). This book follows this view – but without the implication that the bunker hunter is wasting their time or otherwise exposed or diminished by the analyst’s unmasking of what is really going on. Yes, it is remarkable how much effort some apply to interrogating the Cold War’s bunker remains, but this book is not an indictment of those projects; the intention is a balance of reverence and analytical critique in order to better understand the motives and modes of the resignification of these Cold War remains.