by Luke Bennett
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Chapter 2
Entering the Bunker with Paul Virilio
The Atlantic Wall, Pure War and Trauma
Luke Bennett
This book is about how people make sense of, and attach significance to, abandoned concrete defensive shelters. We must therefore necessarily start by introducing Paul Virilio and Bunker Archeology1 (1994), his seminal study of the Nazi fortifications of the Atlantic Wall which was first published in France in 1975. After introducing the causes and consequences of Virilio’s bunker-hunting, we will then consider how his project and its resulting insights have influenced (or at least help us to understand) early 21st-century valorization of the Cold War’s now-abandoned bunkers. The chapter will also specifically consider how trauma – and efforts to overcome it – appears to be an important driver behind both Virilio’s and contemporary compulsive bunker-hunting. But first, a short synopsis of the origins and form of the Atlantic Wall will help to set the scene for this examination of Virilio’s bunker-related work, and of its relevance to this book’s project.
THE ATLANTIC WALL
In 1941 Hitler abandoned his plans for an invasion of England and turned his attention to the Eastern front, but the coastline of about 5,000 kilometres stretching from the Bay of Biscay to the Fjords of Norway presented a vulnerable flank. Consequently, a comprehensive programme of fortification was ordered, starting with the Channels Islands, then Norway and then the entirety of the Northern and Western European coastline: the goal, a Fortress Europe, with concrete bunkers marking out the perimeter of a vast continental ‘Hitlerian Space’ (Virilio 1994, 57).
The Atlantic Wall was designed to be comprised of 15,000 bunkers (in the end 12,000 were built), utilizing a pattern book of 700 universal bunker components (of which 250 were most extensively used), all expressing the systematization emergent in pre-war modernist architecture (and specifically German Expressionism) – and its growing interest in the affordances of concrete as a material of mass construction. Organisation Todt (OT) was given responsibility for the construction works, that military and civil engineering organization having successfully built the autobahn network prior to the outbreak of war. OT had also recently completed the Westwall (otherwise known as the Seigfried Line), a linear defence of bunkers and tank obstacles along the western German border. The Westwall was a mirror of the French Maginot Line fortifications, built in the 1930s, that faced it along France’s eastern border. Thus the Atlantic Wall should be seen as a culmination (and escalation) of what went before, not as a new radical departure, but it did – in its scale – amount to the largest project ever using reinforced concrete: 13 million cubic metres of concrete, 1 million tonnes of iron, 4 billion Reichmarks, according to Albert Speer (who took over management of the project in December 1941). In his autobiography (Speer 1970), Speer conceded that this was very wasteful diversion of resources that could have been employed elsewhere within the war effort, but he failed to offer any mea culpa for the thousands of forced labourers drawn from across Nazi-conquered territories, who were made to work on the Atlantic Wall’s construction sites, an aspect that Rose Tzalmona (2011, 2013) consider still shamefully overlooked in contemporary engagements with these bunkers. For Tzalmona, the wall’s story is as much that of its people as of its moulded concrete.
From the outset, meaning making was a key and pressing feature of engagements with the Atlantic Wall’s emergent structures, with the Allies taking an increasing interest in these vast construction works, in the knowledge that a systematic bunkerology would be key to the success of any Allied invasion of Normandy. This wartime bunker-hunting was achieved through mapping the structures via aerial reconnaissance and using resistance groups to understand the interconnections
and logistics of the emerging bunker system. This all required great ingenuity, for the Normandy beaches were forbidden spaces during the war, and on one occasion, an enterprising French resistance group organized a phony beach photography contest in order to gather snapshots that they could send to the Allies.
After the war, recovery was equated with forgetting (and clearing up) the mess left behind). Many of the Atlantic Wall’s bunkers were demolished or buried during the first decade after 1945. Then, as Tzalmona (2011, 2013) shows, slowly from the late 1950s artists and others started to question and challenge this ‘forgetting’, with this remembrance work culminating in a wave of intensive aesthetic bunker engagement in 1969–1971 by young German artists Anselm Kiefer,2 Joseph Beuys3 and Markus Lüpertz co-opting the Atlantic Wall into artworks that attempted to deal with national guilt, accountability and remembrance. This was then followed in 1975 by Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archeology exhibition in Paris, the first public showing of the iconic photographs documenting his bunker-hunting along the Atlantic Wall during the period 1958 to 1965.
Günter Grass’s 1959 The Tin Drum (2004) was an early part of the German awakening and Grass’s fiction oddly parallels Virilio’s own ‘discovery’ of the bunker in 1958 – and of all subsequent bunker-hunting – for it features two chapters about the Atlantic Wall. The first chronicles the mundane experience of a unit of soldiers stationed at Dora, a bunker cluster in Normandy, and includes a digression upon the novelty of the bunkers’ ‘oblique formations’ (2004, 317). The second chapter portrays a return visit in 1950 by some of the former occupants, which juxtaposes one former soldier (Lankes, an artist) who now regards the bunkers as passé and another (Herzog) who repeatedly and compulsively revisits the bunkers, re-measuring them as part of his attempt to make sense of his wartime experiences. Grass portrays Herzog as continually drawn back to the Dora site ‘because the thought of these fortifications gave him no sleep’ (2004, 521), and he evocatively encapsulates Herzog’s intense relationship with ‘his’ bunkers, by describing a moment at which Herzog turns from surveying the bunker landscape with binoculars and maps and ‘caress[es] the gun embrasures of Dora Six as tenderly as though fondling his wife’ (521). Here Grass foregrounds both the recuperative importance of return to (and re-engagement with) a site of unresolved trauma and the embodied, affective-material qualities of this chosen, intense focus upon a ‘dumb-brute’ concrete structure. Grass is showing us how the Dora bunkers are put to work by Herzog through his chosen (and sensual and intimate) re-engagement with them.
For Mette Haakonsen (2009) the Atlantic Wall bunkers offer a ‘unique experiential value … [as] … negative heritage’ (92) – as admonitory monuments (Mahnmals in German) – but not as stand-alone, self-contained historical artefacts. Instead they are opportunities for an engagement, and a projection of meaning through embodied experience. For her the turning of these bunkers into an aesthetic object is something reflexively chosen; it is performative – based on the act of imaginative commemoration of a past and the affective-material engagement with the bunkers’ surfaces in the present. Haakonsen’s characterization of these emergent bunker aesthetics starts with Laurajane Smith’s (2006, 3) Uses of Heritage, and uses Smith’s argument that heritage is a performative social construct comprising:
a multi-layered performance – be this a performance of visiting, managing, interpretation or conservation – that embodies acts of remembrance and commemoration while negotiating and constructing a sense of place, belonging and understanding in the present.
However, Haakonsen doesn’t follow Smith into deprivileging and denaturalizing the material basis of heritage – instead for Haakonsen the sheer materiality is important and as its own force as an affordance (or resistance) to the act of a meaning-making engagement with an object. Thus visitors to bunkers must conduct an embodied investigation as they navigate their surfaces, and build up a full picture of what is before them. For the perception of a bunker is not instantaneous: as with any three-dimensional sculptural form, the act of viewing is temporal and embodied. Bunkers have to be walked around, viewed from multiple angles, you can’t see everything, all at once. The bunker, then, gives us something to clamber upon and pore over, and in this attentive unfurling act – if we wish to – we can choose to feel that we are, through our embodied actions, somehow climbing into another time (and not necessarily a reliably grounded, empirical past).
VIRILIO TOUCHES THE BUNKER
Paul Virilio caressed his first bunker in 1958, one lazy summer’s day in 1958, while holidaying at Saint-Guénolé in Brittany:
I was leaning against a solid mass of concrete, which I had previously used as a cabana; all the usual seaside games had become a total bore; I was vacant in the middle of my vacation … scanning the horizon…, with nothing interrupting my gaze, brought me full round to my own vantage point, to the heat and to this massive lean-to buttressing my body; this solid inclined mass of concrete, this worthless object, which up until then had managed to martial my interest only as a vestige of the Second World War, only as an illustration for a story, a story of total war. (Virilio 1994, 10–11)
Upon entering his first bunker Virilio believed he had found something elemental inside it: a deep transcultural resonance of the tomb and the place of shelter, for upon entering the bunker ‘a complete series of cultural memories came to mind: the Egyptian mastabas, the Etruscan tombs, the Aztec structures’ (11). Upon entering, Virilio had also felt a sensation of being crushed, and the bunker-space also struck him as a disorienting and heterotopic, a space in which normal meanings were disrupted, for ‘some clothes and bicycles had been hidden here; [but] the object no longer made the same sense [here]’ (1994, 11).
Virilio’s initial attempt to write an account of his experience (originally written in 1958, first published in 1966 and then incorporated into the Bunker Archeology book in 1975) placed it squarely within the phenomenological frameworks of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gaston Bachelard in which space and architecture are regarded as experiential, iconographic and even poetic. Virilio had acquired an interest in theories of perception, gestalt and phenomenology in the 1950s, and went on to attend some philosophy lectures at the Sorbonne in the early 1960s, while studying stained glass design at art school in Paris. John Armitage also points to Virilio’s (Armitage 2015, 38) ‘semi-religious understanding of the character of the bunker’, a reference to Virilio’s avowed Catholic faith, and his affective reaction to the discovery of this space is portrayed in his 1966 original account as an epiphany, which turned him into a bunker hunter, seeking out ‘these grey forms until they transmit to be part of their mystery’ and pondering why ‘these extraordinary constructions, compared to seaside villas, [would] not be perceived or even recognised?’ (1994, 11).
And the more Virilio looked, the more bunkers he found: ‘Solid masses in the hollows of urban spaces … [secreted and now abandoned] … in the middle of apartment buildings, in courtyards, and in public squares … [all] … out of tune with the urban environment’ (1994, 12) and yet all seemingly invisible to passers-by. Thereafter, Virilio’s bunker-hunting led him along the Atlantic Wall, then to the fortifications of the Siegfried and Maginot Lines, then to Fortress Europe’s other military spaces – rocket launching sites, autobahns, radar stations and flak towers. This increasingly systematic bunkerological study included archival research in Germany and the development of typologies of bunker forms. And all done in his spare time, as a hobby, as a private investigation pursued in order to come to terms with bunkers as a phenomenon.
Virilio’s project was a slow one in terms of its public face at least, with only two short (circa 300 words) essays to show for his efforts prior to 1975. These were published in 1966 in issue no.7 of the magazine Architecture Principe, which he co-edited with Claude Parent, an experimentally minded architect working with concrete whom Virilio collaborated with between 1963 and 1968. Then in 1975 Virilio was invited to exhibit the iconic black and white bunker photograph
s at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, and to publish the exhibition in book form – Bunker Archeology – accompanied by essays and documents, firstly in French (1975) and later in an English translation in 1994.
Virilio defined his project as archaeological – but noted that for many locals these buildings were ‘not yet archaeological’ (1994, 13), and would not be until more time had passed to allow these objects to be engaged with dispassionately as history rather than as memories of traumatic experience. Indeed, Virilio’s interest in these bunkers attracted hostility from some locals. These were places that held bad memories – to be shunned or attacked in outbreaks of ‘iconoclastic vengeance’ (1994, 13). Thus, Virilio saw his project as an adventure into edgy, uncharted territory and in doing so summoned something of a sense of the future for it, by declaring: ‘I believe I was alone in seeing something else springing up, a new meaning for these landmarks aligned along the European littoral’ (1994, 13). Thus Virilio intended his bunker-hunting as a process of systematic investigation of what these forms were, and of what knowing them might lead onto.
WHAT VIRILIO FOUND IN THE BUNKER
The bunker inspired Virilio in a number of ways. As John Beck (2011) notes, through his bunker photographs, Virilio was attempting to disrupt ‘aesthetic categories by the insertion of found military architecture into the discourse of modernism’ (2011, 88) – much in the same way that his German contemporaries Bernd and Hilla Becher (1970) were attempting to do with their typologies of industrial forms (grain silos, blast furnaces, water towers and others), in each case reclassifying as architectural-aesthetic forms types of buildings previously regarded as purely engineering-functional. Virilio resignified these abandoned structures as worthy of attention: his black-and-white photographs, that now look to us so stylish and iconic, would have had very different connotations when originally shot.