In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker

by Luke Bennett

  In short, this case study can be positioned at the cross-road of ‘acoustical and cultural analysis’ (Feld 1991) as it ‘involves both an account of the physical or material conditions of sound production and the social and historical conditions of its invocation and interpretation’ (Feld 1991, 79). Materiality, as Joanna Sofaer (2007) argues, ‘provides the means by which social relations are visualized…. Without material expression social expressions have little substantive reality, as there is nothing through which these relations can be mediated’ (Sofaer 2007, 1). However, the music festival demonstrates a possibility to go beyond visual-centric analyses and engage in recuperative materialism to gain a more nuanced understanding of the complex interactions between objects and people. Music, though intangible, is equally powerful in conveying feelings and is actively generating affective alliances and re-creating collective memories in the military tunnel. Yet, it does not act alone. It appears as part of the materiality of the tunnel for it is the acoustics of the granite structure that allows the music to be what it is. Forays into such performances highlight the importance to analyse not just the materialities, but also the immaterialities of post-war material culture.

  ‘MAKING SENSE’ OF RAPPROCHEMENT TOURISM

  To understand what people are and what they might become, one must understand what goes on between people and things.

  (Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton 1981, 1)

  This chapter has sought to destabilize the often-perceived banality of Kinmen’s post-war landscape by highlighting the agency and liveliness of the Kinmen Tunnel Music Festival in its interactions with humans. By engaging with the concepts of commemorative and recuperative materialism, the chapter has attempted to go beyond visual-centric analyses and re-orientate studies on post-war material culture from a constructivist approach to one that recognizes the interactivity of objects and humans via the senses of touch and hearing. By way of conclusion, I make three reflections on the materiality, memory, and fluidity of Cold War artefacts.

  First, by situating this discussion in the wider literature on commemorative materialities, I see materiality as the platform where things and people communicate. I have gone beyond visual-centric engagement with materiality by capturing the sensate and sensorial aspects of human–thing interactions. Hetherington’s (2002) discussion on touch as a source of visualisation that is ‘proximal’ rather than ‘distal’ could also, as this chapter has shown, be applied to the other senses. As such, by engaging with a sensuous materialism, we are able to sift through the sentiments evoked by the melody of the Zhaishan Tunnel music. This contributes to a more intimate understanding of the multiple ways in which Kinmen’s post-war material culture participates in the rapprochement and recuperation processes. Furthermore, the sensorium (Ong 1991), an arena within which the sensory apparatus of an individual or a culture operates, is a useful place to situate and advance the dialogue between materiality and therapeutic landscape studies.

  Second, as Christopher Tilley (2004, 219) suggests, ‘it is memory that serves to connect knowledges of one place to another, without which experience remains shallow and non-contextual’. The Zhaishan Tunnel serves to remind locals and tourists of the past as much as it embodies glimpses of the future. Yet, not all Cold War artefacts seek to remember. At times, these things attempted to forget the conflict, but were still very much haunted by spirits of the past. However, as the Tunnel Music Festival shows, there are instances where things welcome a reflection of the past through their materialities while at the same time attempt to re-create collective memories for former enemies. Indeed, things are capable of transmitting/communicating affects. Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton’s (1981) notion of psychic energies inherent in things proved to be useful in arguing for the potential of things to evoke memories of the past, remake collective memories and importantly contribute to post-war recuperation. In the case of the Kinmen Tunnel Music Festival, ‘while memory may be drawn upon to signify, it is made anew, drawn through performance, and thus flows in time with the other components of performance. It is less that memory is performed than it is “in performance” ’ (Crouch 2004, 92). By gaining a better appreciation of such affective communication of things, we may be a step closer to understanding the mentalities of people in coping with the past in a post-conflict society.

  Lastly, it is worthwhile to interrogate and capture materiality in action, and to appreciate how meanings are always in a state/flux of emergence rather than inscribed or inferred by social scientists. Indeed, a Tilley (2004, 222) posits, ‘Things and places are active agents of identity rather than pale reflections of pre-existing ideas and socio-political relations. Having real material and ideological effects on persons and social relations, things and places can then be regarded as much subjects as objects of identity’. More specifically, through the Zhaishan Tunnel example, I have shown that things from the military past often re-invent their materialities over time to adapt to changing political circumstances. The Tunnel’s defensive materiality softens in the face of music to echo rhythms of harmony across the Taiwan Strait.

  In conclusion, it is hoped that forays into the reincarnation of Cold War infrastructures and how their materialities interact with and shape people’s consciousness of past histories and present happenings can help us gain a more nuanced understanding of rapprochement between former enemies. Recuperative materialism offers an avenue for us to gain a better sense of the past and a fuller appreciation of the ‘sense-able’ present.

  NOTES

  1.The term ‘therapeutic landscapes’ was first used by Gesler (1992) to refer to physical landscapes that possess certain therapeutic effects or healing properties. However, this concept has evolved to include built environments for specific groups of people, for example, gardens for the elderly. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to map the changing landscape of scholarly enquiries into therapeutic landscapes. See Rose (2012) for a succinct summary.

  2.The Kuningtou Battle in 1949 is the only battle where the communist soldiers landed on Kinmen and engaged in face-to-face combat with the nationalist soldiers. The nationalist eventually won this battle – their first victory in many months of retreat from the mainland. This victory has since been recognized as a key turning point in preventing a communist take-over.

  3.I would like to thank the Kinmen National Park for generously sharing this information.

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  Chapter 9

  Once upon a Time in Ksamil

  Communist and Post-Communist Biographies of Mushroom-Shaped Bunkers in Albania

  Emily Glass

  No-one has been born so far to intimidate the Albanians. The borders of Albania and the Albanian soil are protected by a people and a Party who will shower bullets into the mouths of all who dare encroach upon it.

  Enver Hoxha (Communist Party Publication 1969)

  Led by the dictator Enver Hoxha, communist Albania operated through a strictly centralized regime that placed defence and independence at the forefront of its ideological stance. This system forged a sense of identity, sustained using its own brand of xenophobic nationalism known as Albanianism. The physical expression of this paranoid Cold War dogma was cast across the landscape of Albania in the form of concrete bunkers, leaving a legacy that symbolizes a turbulent history of militarization and Hoxha’s fierce approach to self-preservation. This chapter will explore this story through the case study of Ksamil, a coastal village and its surrounding peninsula close to Albania’s southern border with Greece. Ksamil was once situated at the junction between the two main competing ideologies of East and West (Uzzell & Ballantyne 1998, 161), but in an ironic twist, its more recent economic development as a seaside tourist destination has facilitated candid interactions between foreigners and those same Cold War defences designed to deter them from even contemplating setting foot on Albania’s shores.

  As a material manifestation of 20th-century modern conflict, Albania’s landscape bears multi-layered archaeological scars of the recent past. This archaeology of the contemporary past – positioned within the theoretical framework of supermodernity – is broadly categorized as the archaeology of those of us who are alive, characterized by our trauma, emotion and intimate involvement (González-Ruibal 2008, 248). The most ubiquitous, iconic and distinctive scar of Albania’s Cold War world is that constituted by the mushroom-shaped bunker (henceforth MSB). These reinforced concrete constructions are unofficially called mushrooms due to their exposed domed cap and subterranean straight sides which make them appear to sprout from the ground. However, under communism, these structures were called Qendra Zjarri bunkers taken from the Albanian term for ‘centre of fire’ (Stefa & Mydyti 2012). Using examples of such bunkers in Ksamil, but with additional support drawn from research undertaken in the wider southern region and the history of Albania as a whole, this chapter will examine the cultural biographies of these objects by weaving narratives of engagement beyond their centralized conception and towards regional narratives of installation, use, abandonment and subsequent re-engagement. As people and objects gather time, movement and alternative uses, the processes of these transformations are inextricably linked together (Gosden & Marshall 1999, 169). In the case of Albania’s MSBs, their varied temporal phases and object (re)uses add extra layers of meaning, thereby fostering a wider and more multivalent comprehension of both the bunker as artefact and of the society from which it has arisen.

  APPROACHING THE ALBANIAN BUNKER

  Albania is a place forged amid the turmoil of the 20th century and became a theatre within which successive internal and external regimes were established, fought and fell. These episodes were punctuated by experiences of conflict, from the 1912 independence from the Ottoman Empire, onto the First World War and through the Second World War. In 1944, Albania was liberated from a German occupation, and power was seized by the Albanian Communist Party with Enver Hoxha as leader until his death in 1985. This initiated almost 50 years of communist governance during the period known globally as the Cold War.

  Like its neighbour, Yugoslavia, and as we will see in more detail later, Albania sought to maintain an independent path during much of the Cold War. Accordingly, Albania’s Cold War saw multiple perceived external threats to the sovereignty of the country and on Hoxha’s leadership. Some of these may have been real, but they were predominantly the result of nationalistic propaganda (Galaty et al. 1999, 202, 2009, 177). This style of Cold War politics was pursued by the Albanian leadership to assert and sustain a paranoid ‘war psychosis’ over the population (Prifti 1978, 259). No other initiative pursued by communist Albania has quite encapsulated the concept of a state-sanctioned war mentality as the production and installation of innumerable MSBs. This bunkerization of Albania was designed to physically and mentally prepare people for an imminent foreign attack and forge a sense of partisanship through fear. The militarization of Albanian soil was one of Hoxha’s personal projects, which appears to have been run on an open-ended timescale with no material upper limit. Large domed artillery bunkers were installed, as were gun emplacements, party-controlled shelter complexes, civilian air-raid shelters and military tunnels for munitions, aviation, submarines and other army transportation or machinery. There is no absolute consensus regarding the number of MSBs in Albania. This situation becomes even more confusing when it is taken into account that all communist defence types are collectively referred to as bunkers, which may count towards discrepancies across the literature. Estima
tes range from 180,000 (Kaser 2001) to 300,000 (Hall 1994) and up to one million (Hamilton 1992; Rugg 1994; Drakulic 1996), but the average reported number is between 500,000 and 750,000. But by whatever count, Albania – a very small country – had a very large number of bunkers, and this paranoid excess was the result of a tense conflict-derived interrelationship between the Albanian landscape, subject (people) and object (the bunker), an affective-material complex which has endured long beyond the fall of the regime.

  My analysis of Albania’s Cold War experience is situated within the interdisciplinary field of modern conflict archaeology, an archaeological and anthropological approach within which conflict is viewed as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. Conflict transforms the material worlds of soldiers and civilians through the creation of new experiences and ideas within the pressurized theatre of warfare, either on the fighting or home fronts. This approach to conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries encompasses elements of social archaeology, public archaeology and anthropological archaeology, and is one of the many so-called archaeologies of the contemporary past (Saunders 2007, vi; Saunders 2010, 46). Conflicts of the modern era are defined by their technologies and are all wars of matériel (Saunders 2001, 476). This term embraces the physical remains of military and civilian human conflict, the experiences and observations of the people involved and the place in the landscape into which they were embedded, created, transported or utilized to varying degrees of success (Schofield et al. 2002, 1). MSBs are one of communist Albania’s most significant matériel responses to the Cold War conflict, as demonstrated by their programmes of manufacture, networks of installation and military consumption.