In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker

by Luke Bennett

  5.A NATO defence line based around plans to flood the Ijssel in the event of a Soviet attack. The line was declassified in 1990, and tours of its features are now run by the Ijssel Line Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the research and preservation of the line’s features: http://www.ijssellinie.info/ENGELS/index.html

  6.http://www.battlefieldsww2.com/Luchtmachtbasis_Deelen.html

  7.http://atoombunker.nl/

  8.http://www.rietveldlandscape.com/en/projects/7

  9.http://www.b-ild.com/bunker/

  10.http://vuurtoreneiland.nl/

  11.http://waterliniemuseum.nl/

  Part V

  CONCLUSION

  Chapter 14

  Presencing the Bunker

  Past, Present and Future

  Luke Bennett

  The contributors to this volume have shown how the Cold War bunker troubles us and provokes us, but also how it provides opportunities for reappropriation, reinterpretation and reinvention. The bunker is not just of the past, but it is also part of the present and future. This book began with an early 21st-century encounter with the remains of a hilltop Cold War bunker, observing two family members and their simultaneous, but different, engagements with the remains of that once-secret and politically charged 20th-century place. That encounter has fuelled this book’s attempt to make sense of bunker hunters’ diverse modes and motivations, and in particular how a once-political concern to ‘presence’ the bunker has mutated into study for other ends – heritage, art, recreation redevelopment. And it seems that this multivalence is increasingly opening up as the Cold War fades from direct experience and memory, and decouples from ideological directionality.

  But the bunker’s blankness and its ability to reflect whatever meanings are cast onto it is also problematic and is characteristic of the nuclear state’s ability to always find a way to mask its exceptionality. For John Beck (2011) the bunker is incapable of cultural recuperation, and we fall into the bunker’s thrall if we attempt to normalize it and to cast off its political culpability. For the bunker was centrally implicated in the Cold War’s dark history, it facilitated bombing campaigns, nuclear testing and systems of political control based upon the nuclear anxiety of mass extinction.

  To start to formulate a future for the bunker, we must come to terms with its past, but the question then arising is how much we can (or should) learn to forget the horror of the bunkers’ Cold War purpose now that the Cold War is ‘the past’. The resolution of this question is complicated by the Cold War’s own temporal oddities. As Virilio noted, the Cold War had strange time-stopping effects – during that era it seemed like it would last forever (via a constant anxious presence, terminated only by the time-ending finality of nuclear Armageddon). The Cold War planned for the end of the world – fusing eschatology and war for the first time (via the nuclear sublime): it presented an existential threat that (before the discovery of global climate change) was uniquely collectively existential. Somehow 45 years spent waiting for extinction was somehow reconciled with getting on with other things – but the unsettled feelings (Joseph Masco’s ‘uncanny modernity’ [2006, 1]) had deep psychic effects, and one totem of this is the Cold War bunker. And unlike bombs and rockets the bunker is an object we have a chance of meeting face to face – now abandoned in mundane hilltop fields – and render tamed or known through that encounter. It is a type of place where we could (and perhaps should) try to remember the Cold War’s raw power – political and biopolitical, simultaneously acted out upon minds and bodies. Set against official secrecy, the invisibility of radiation, the bunker is a uniquely materialized and localized testimony of the Cold War that in most other respects was always beyond direct, sensate encounter. But after presencing the bunker, and meeting with it, what should we do then? Should we learn to laugh or to cry in the face of the bunker?

  PRESENCING THE BUNKER

  As Kathrine Sandys has argued in her contribution to this book, the fantasy bunker’s prominence in popular culture makes it difficult for us to keep noticing the ‘real’ bunker in a critical political sense – cultural saturation tips the attention over into the theatrical, the touristic or the playful. And those who manage bunkers are only too aware of this effect; thus the manager of the once-top-secret UK government Cold War complex beneath Corsham in Wiltshire wryly notes that there are

  rumours abounding about the facilities down here. At one time we were said to be the UK’s Area 51, we have alien space craft down here, and we have experimentation with aliens … which people, they can go out and think that if they want to. (Interview with the site’s Mine Manager, Andy Quinn, in Croce 2008)

  The ‘discovery’ of the Corsham complex has been presented, in various sources (ranging from Hennessy 2003 to online blogs1), as entailing a process of intrepid exploration and the uncovering of ‘a secret base’, for which unending (and ever more fanciful) speculation must ensue. But the semantic collision of aliens, recreational exploration and increasingly well-worn bunker imagery actually work together: ‘to denature the reality of the now-proven existence of a city-sized former underground government base: a revelation of what the state was (and is still) physically capable of building and hiding becomes invisible at the moment of (and by the manner of) its unmasking’ (Bennett 2013a, 516). And in a further warping of reality, the Corsham complex is now available for hire as a film set, its first use having been as a fictional secret base in The Sparticle Mystery (2011), a children’s drama series produced for the BBC. Thus a (real) once-secret base is now represented as a different (fictional) secret base for the purposes of light entertainment – the effect of which is to thoroughly normalize the existence of secret subterranean bases.

  As many commentators contend (e.g. Masco 2006; Beck 2011; Hogg 2015; Bouylan 2015), objects related to the nuclear state all have the ability to hide in plain sight, and it is necessary for us to actively work hard to render visible these objects: and an extreme example of this presencing would be the three elderly Ploughshares activists chronicled by Eric Schlosser (2015) who one night in 2012 infiltrated the perimeter of the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility (the US fortified store for weapons grade uranium), and sprayed the bunker’s white walls with vials of a colleague’s blood, in order to confound its invisibility.

  Such performative actions – augmentations or ‘reanimations’ (in the sense developed by Orange 2015) – imply that the bunker cannot speak for itself. And yet there is also a view that these structures are able to give their own testimony – thus UK Government Heritage Minister Tracey Crouch announced on giving protected heritage status to a fallout shelter constructed in a Norfolk back garden in 1982: ‘This unique building is a clear reminder of the fear and anxiety that was present throughout the country during the Cold War’ (DCMS 2016). But can a building – of itself – either preserve or transmit a memory of fear and anxiety? And even if it can stir a remembrance of such feelings in those who lived through the Cold War, how can the building itself communicate that affective experience to future generations? Surely some augmentation is needed to ensure this heritage effect.

  Rose Tzalmona has criticized the augmentation of Atlantic Wall remains in France, concerned that such repurposing inadvertently contributes to collective amnesia. She also criticizes the restoration of bunkers to form orderly heritage ‘attractions’. She accepts that authenticity can never be fully captured or preserved, but concludes:

  We must question the validity of such trivialising practices which aggravate in turn a disjuncture between the horrors experienced in war, accessible only to those who actually live through the traumatic realities of death and combat, and collective remembrance as an imaginative act. It is therefore of particular relevance to consider that the closest ‘authentic experience’ is already being offered by the sites and bunkers themselves – in their present ruinous state. (emphasis in original) (Tzalmona 2011, 783)

  In contrast, Nadia Bartolini (2015) examines the effects of staging Conf
ronti, a 2009 art show, in a former Mussolini-era bunker in Rome. The press release for which claimed that the artist’s intervention was an attempt to ‘transform a place associated with suffering and war to one that evokes culture, encourages tolerance and fosters the exchange of ideas’ (from the organizer’s press release – quoted by Bartolini at page 197). Bartolini finds herself unconvinced – not because she ascribes to Tzalmona’s ‘leave it as it was’ prescription – but rather because the artists had simply assumed that the presentation of their artworks would trigger an affective response by the visitors in the same way that it had for them as makers of the installation. She also felt that the artists had wrongly assumed that the bunker could speak for itself through its decaying state (via some form of material agency). Bartolini’s argument is that the bunker cannot simply speak for itself – its vibrancy has to be created (or at least assisted) via curation. As she states ‘a concrete container located underground is not equivalent to identifying the structure as “Mussolini’s bunker” ’ (207) – the latter requires more to achieve. Thus here we re-encounter the curatorial dilemmas discussed by Rachael Bowers and Kevin Booth in their chapter about English Heritage’s curation of York Nuclear Bunker as a heritage site. Making these sites visible requires both creativity and selectivity. Furthermore, we are naïve if we fail to appreciate that – as Inge Hermann’s chapter notes – Cold War attractions are selected and narrated in order to give particular messages relevant to the present day. In this regard Roseanna Farbøl (2015) has shown how, in the case of Denmark’s Cold War bunker museums, governmental support has been forthcoming because of the museum’s ability to support a right-wing agenda of a commitment to the ‘War on Terror’, through their narrative of the nation’s Cold War preparedness.

  And what is the role of the arts? Beck is cautious about the power of the arts to aid the narration of Cold War places because of the ever-present risk that the arts become co-opted into ‘the self-erasing’ (Beck 2009, 4) – or at least trivializing or normalizing – mechanics of the nuclear state. But Beck does acknowledge the power of art to augment the archive (which through official secrecy denies us a full picture of the Cold War) through processes of (1) memory work, (2) fiction (imagination and speculation) and (3) direct material encounter. Meanwhile John Schofield (2005) and Gair Dunlop (2013) are less pessimistic. Schofield, as an archaeologist and former Head of Military Programmes for English Heritage, has a track record of engaging artists in the process of bringing forth meaning for Cold War sites, by finding new ways to stir memory and to provoke wider thought about the recent past. Meanwhile, Dunlop sees creative practitioners as offering up ‘a kind of “feral scholarship” which enables new insights’ (Dunlop 2013, 223), and for this he takes his inspiration from British artist John Latham (1921–2006) who engaged in making art in non-art contexts (e.g. industry) via the Artists Placement Group. Specifically, Dunlop argues that the artist can use creativity to tackle ‘secrecy, a cultivated sense of unknowability and a paradoxical relation between intangibility of subject and solidity of structure’ (2013, 207), giving as his example Louise K. Wilson’s 2005 extended sonic research at the Orford Ness site. As Wilson has described in her own chapter in this collection, this entailed her re-installing the sound of the centrifuge formerly located in the now-derelict Lab 2, a device which had been used at Orford to test the stability for transportation of the UK’s first nuclear weapons, Blue Danube. By re-installing that sound (and transferring it from the machine’s current home at the Atomic Weapons Establishment’s – still operational – Aldermaston facility), Wilson rendered the machine simultaneously absent and present, and pointed to a ‘past’ that is still ‘present-day’ elsewhere.

  This ability of art to point to the continuation of the nuclear state is important, as is a realization that the ‘Pure War’ (Virilio & Lotringer 1983) condition of the Cold War is now even more sublimated. As Marc Lafleur (2007) puts it: ‘It is imperative now that we compose a new vocabulary of war, one which mimics and can thus highlight the very terrain war [now] occupies: the everyday, the virtual, the banal, the immanent’ (225) and this can best be achieved by going to war’s actual places – its infrastructures, its places that enable its disappearance and its banal instantiations: in the city (Graham 2011), in computer and media networks, in offices and command centres and ultimately in the bunker. In 2006, working in this vein, and to his own surprise, photographer David Moore was granted access to an unidentified operational UK government bunker (probably PINDAR). His resulting work, The Last Things (Moore 2008), depicts the objects furnishing this place: beds, telephones, tooth brushes, chairs, tables and so forth, all devoid of any actual human presence. The overall effect is both unsettling and banal, for what is depicted is a modest modern office block, but one which happens to be below ground and protected by blast doors and its own ventilation and power system. In its form it is spectacularly unremarkable. In its function it is an exceptional space.

  FUNKY BUNKERS

  Meanwhile, a former bunker in Stockholm has been remade to have a spectacular form, in service of an unexceptional function. Writing in 2012 Robert McMillan takes us ‘deep inside the James Bond Villain Lair that actually exists’ (McMillan 2012). The site of this collision of fact and fiction is Pionen White Mountains (a former civil defence bunker complex burrowed into rock beneath Stockholm’s Vita Berg Park). Renovated in 2006 by architect Albert France-Lanord for Banhof, the Internet Service Provider, the complex was restyled (and extended) to create a funky underground server centre, stripping out the time-stood-still 1970s furnishings of the decommissioned civil defence facility and replacing them with a high modernist ‘villain’s lair’ movie-set aesthetic channelling Ken Adam’s James Bond super-villain bases Silent Running (1972) and Alien (1979). This effect was achieved with copious use of metal gantries, multi-coloured spotlights, hydroponics and emphasis of the hewn stone walls. The project is an expression of surfaces, images and playful appropriation of the bunker. Echoing the interest in subterranean bunker affective-materialities explored by Sandys, Flintham, Zhang, Pérez and Geesink’s chapters in this book, Albert France-Lanord emphasizes the interaction with the unhuman qualities of the subterranean thus:

  The starting point of the project was to consider the rock as a living organism. The humans try to acclimate themselves to this foreign world and bring the ‘best’ elements from earth: light, plants, water and technology. We created strong contrasts between rooms where the rock dominates and where the human being is a stranger against rooms where the human being took over totally. The choice of lightning has been very challenging. We tried to bring as much variation as possible. Otherwise it is very easy to lose the feeling of time in an enclosed space. (Arch Daily, 2008)

  As Per Strömberg notes, abandoned bunkers have become a ‘cultural playground’ (2013, 67), repurposed via the ‘well-established art practice of borrowing or stealing, making new uses for and changing the meaning of objects, images and artefacts of a culture’ (2013, 67), and these interventions are usually spurred by economic agendas of reuse and re-generation (driven by a fear of what might happen if any building is left unused: Bennett 2017); thus (so the logic goes) ‘the cultural alchemy of appropriation turns the materiality of bare concrete walls into new economic value’ (Strömberg 2013, 78). This imperative is clearly articulated in Geesink’s account of his Atoombunker redevelopment project presented earlier in this volume.

  Strömberg (2013) provides a striking example of a Swedish bunker refurbishment scheme that tries to reconcile economic regeneration, affective authenticity and heritage conservation. The result reveals something very strange about what we appear to want from the bunker. The scheme concerned the Swedish coastal battery fortress of Fårösund on the northern tip of Gotland. The Swedish State’s National Property Board was keen to repurpose this former military site, and to stimulate local employment to redress the job losses of military closures. Accordingly, it supported a proposal for a ‘sympathetic’ h
eritage-focused luxury hotel: one where (as Strömberg 2013, 69 notes):

  you can sleep in one of the former bomb shelters furnished as fancy hotel rooms and enjoy a gourmet dinner prepared by fashionable chefs at the place where artillery pieces once were positioned to command the sea. The whole concept is adapted to a military theme. Everything is low-key in colour, scale and finishes: grey and green. Raw materials of local limestone and steel, articulated in a severe minimalism, arouse ‘post-military’ relaxation in the bunker lounge.

  Meanwhile, the perimeter of the site remains ‘authentically’ edged by rusting barbed wire and deserted defence obstacles (presenting as ‘fossils of the military era’ – Strömberg 2013, 70), all now co-opted into the themed hotel’s ‘design scenery’ (69).

  WHAT DO WE WANT FROM THE BUNKER?

  This semantic confusion appears to be a vindication of Beck’s (2011) ‘ambivalence’ thesis: it seems that we may want contradictory things from the bunker and resolve that incongruity via a wilful conflation of tastes and registers: military-holiday-future-past all rolled together to service the taste for novel experiences. Our relationship to bunkers, their past, present and future is complex. As I suggested in Chapter 3, perhaps we can detect some evidence of a sublime nostalgia at play – that we can scare ourselves safely now by invoking the nuclear- or military-sublime by choosing to visit these places for a short break: safe in the knowledge that this abjection is temporary, of our choosing and that we can choose to leave this experience at any point. Such experience is sublime because we feel that ultimately we are safe – the Cold War has ended, and we have chosen to dabble in this reminiscence or this abjection-lite. This is the ultimate tourism, safely visiting a sanitized version of the past, tasting a remembrance of a childhood fear while sipping fine wine.