by Luke Bennett
In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker
Place, Memory, Affect
Series editors: Neil Campbell, Professor of American Studies at the University of Derby and Christine Berberich, School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies at the University of Portsmouth.
The Place, Memory, Affect series seeks to extend and deepen debates around the intersections of place, memory, and affect in innovative and challenging ways. The series will forge an agenda for new approaches to the edgy relations of people and place within the transnational global cultures of the twenty-first century and beyond.
Walking Inside Out edited by Tina Richardson
The Last Isle: Contemporary Taiwan Film, Culture, and Trauma by Sheng-mei Ma
Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders: Re-Unified Germany After 1989 by Ben Gook
The Mother’s Day Protest and Other Fictocritical Essays by Stephen Muecke
Affective Critical Regionality by Neil Campbell
Visual Arts Practice and Affect edited by Ann Schilo
Haunted Landscapes edited by Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing
In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker edited by Luke Bennett
The Question of Space: Interrogating the Spatial Turn Between Disciplines edited by Marijn Nieuwenhuis and David Crouch (forthcoming)
Nature, Place and Affect: The Poetic Affinities of Edward Thomas and Robert Frost 1912–1917 by Anna Stenning (forthcoming)
In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker
Affect, Materiality and Meaning Making
Edited by Luke Bennett
London • New York
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Copyright © 2017 Selections and Editorial Matter Luke Bennett
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: HB 978-1-7834-8733-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bennett, Luke, editor of compilation.
Title: In the ruins of the Cold War bunker : affect, materiality and meaning making /
edited by Luke Bennett.
Description: London ; New York : Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.,
2017. | Series: Place, memory, affect | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017016051 (print) | LCCN 2017022222 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781783487356 (electronic) | ISBN 9781783487332 (cloth : alkaline paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Cold War—Social aspects. | Bunkers (Fortification) | Historic
buildings. | Abandoned buildings. | Memory—Social aspects. | Totemism—Social
aspects. | Material culture—Social aspects. | Affect (Psychology)—Social aspects. |
Military archaeology. | Landscape archaeology.
Classification: LCC D842 (ebook) | LCC D842 .I45 2017 (print) | DDC
363.3509/045—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017016051
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Figures and Table
Acknowledgements
PART I: INTRODUCING THE BUNKER: RUINS, HUNTERS AND MOTIVES
1 Approaching the Bunker: Exploring the Cold War through Its Ruins
Luke Bennett
2 Entering the Bunker with Paul Virilio: The Atlantic Wall, Pure War and Trauma
Luke Bennett
PART II: LOOKING AT THE BUNKER: REPRESENTATION, IMAGE AND AFFECT
3 Peripheral Artefacts: Drawing [Out] the Cold War
Stephen Felmingham
4 Sublime Concrete: The Fantasy Bunker, Explored
Kathrine Sandys
5 Processual Engagements: Sebaldian Pilgrimages to Orford Ness
Louise K. Wilson
PART III: EMBRACING THE BUNKER: IDENTITY, MATERIALITY AND MEMORY
6 Torås Fort: A Speculative Study of War Architecture in the Landscape
Matthew Flintham
7 Bunker and Cave Counterpoint: Exploring Underground Cold War Landscapes in Greenbrier County, West Virginia
María Alejandra Pérez
8 Recuperative Materialities: The Kinmen Tunnel Music Festival
J. J. Zhang
9 Once upon a Time in Ksamil: Communist and Post-Communist Biographies of Mushroom-Shaped Bunkers in Albania
Emily Glass
PART IV: DEALING WITH THE BUNKER: HUNTING, VISITING AND RE-MAKING
10 Popular Historical Geographies of the Cold War: Hunting, Recording and Playing with Small Munitions Bunkers in Germany
Gunnar Maus
11 ‘A Nice Day Out?’: Exploring Heritage (and) Tourism Discourses at Cold War Bunker Sites in Britain
Inge Hermann
12 Preserving and Managing York Cold War Bunker: Authenticity, Curation and the Visitor Experience
Rachael Bowers and Kevin Booth
13 Atoombunker Arnhem: An Architect’s New Uses for Old Bunkers
Arno Geesink
PART V: CONCLUSION
14 Presencing the Bunker: Past, Present and Future
Luke Bennett
Index
Contributors
Figures and Table
FIGURES
1.1. The Boy and the Bunker (2009). Reproduced by kind permission of Luke Bennett.
3.1. Transition 3 (2012). Charcoal on Fabriano 5 paper, 1.2 m × 1.5 m. Reproduced by kind permission of Stephen Felmingham.
3.2. (Left to right) Peripheral Artefact #7 and Peripheral Artefact #8 (both 2010). Both charcoal and chalk on plaster with lead, 70 cm in diameter. 2013. Reproduced by kind permission of Stephen Felmingham.
4.1. Hush House (2010). Reproduced by kind permission of Kathrine Sandys.
4.2. Radioflash (2009). Reproduced by kind permission of Kathrine Sandys.
5.1. Cobra Mist (2008) (frame capture showing Orford Ness’s ‘pagodas’). Reproduced by kind permission of Emily Richardson.
5.2. Untitled Landscape (2014). Reproduced by kind permission of Anya Gallaccio.
6.1. Torås Kommandoplasse (2010) (frame capture from Lehmann’s footage of Torås). Digital video. Reproduced by kind permission of Matthew Flintham.
6.2. Torås Kommandoplasse (2010) (four frame captures from Lehmann’s footage of Torås). Digital video. Reproduced by kind permission of Matthew Flintham.
7.1. Counterpoint: Greenbrier Bunker’s Door and Organ Cave Shelter’s Shack (2015). Reproduced by kind permission of María Alejandra Pérez.
8.1. Location of Kinmen (2017). Reproduced by kind permission of J. J. Zhang.
&
nbsp; 8.2. The Zhaishan Tunnel (2008). Reproduced by kind permission of J. J. Zhang.
9.1. Early Mushroom-Shaped Bunker Positioned Overlooking the Sea Border with Corfu (2010). Reproduced by kind permission of Emily Glass.
9.2. Ksamil’s Front-Line Painted Mushroom-Shaped Bunkers Exposed by Beach Terracing (2012). Reproduced by kind permission of Emily Glass.
10.1. Deep in the Forest: Sperrmittelhaus in the Vicinity of Bad Oldesloe, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany (2013). Reproduced by kind permission of Gunnar Maus.
11.1. Open to All, Appealing to All: Hack Green Bunker (2009). Reproduced by kind permission of Luke Bennett.
12.1. ROC 20 Group Bunker and Its Surroundings (2015). Reproduced by kind permission of Luke Bennett.
12.2. The Mundane Paraphernalia of Nuclear War: Inside York Bunker (2015). Reproduced by kind permission of Luke Bennett.
13.1. Discovering the Atoombunker (2012). Reproduced by kind permission of Arno Geesink.
13.2. The Present and Future of the Atoombunker (2012). Reproduced by kind permission of Arno Geesink.
14.1. The Last Man, and the Ruins: The Greenham Common’s Cruise Missile Bunkers (2008). Reproduced by kind permission of Matthew Flintham.
TABLE
10.1. Projects and corresponding arrangements that become a context for the bunkers through performance. Reproduced by kind permission of Gunnar Maus.
Acknowledgements
In grateful recognition of his seminal contribution towards the creation of the fantasy of the Cold War bunker, this book is dedicated to movie production designer Ken Adam (1921–2016).
In respectful recognition of the deadly actuality of real bunkers all author and editor royalties for this book are being donated to Medecins Sans Frontieres (www.msf.org.uk).
This book would not have been possible without the support and forbearance of our family members and colleagues: they have shouldered more than their fair share of other burdens as we have trudged around broken concrete hulks, dim caverns, muddy hilltops and dusty archives. This effort is also only possible because of the networks of scholars and enthusiasts who tread the same paths as us, with commendable insight, creativity, and an open, collaborative spirit.
Part I
INTRODUCING THE BUNKER
Ruins, Hunters and Motives
Chapter 1
Approaching the Bunker
Exploring the Cold War through Its Ruins
Luke Bennett
At the top of the hill, scanning the flat fields and the coastline beyond, the boy looks out at the vista now opened up to him by his father’s insistent ascent. A tractor is ploughing the rich red earth, birds are circling and cars are drifting slowly along the winding country roads. Behind him the boy’s dog is rooting around in the undergrowth, and his father is scrutinizing a drab, weathered concrete cube sticking up out of the ground. Now bored, and with nothing better to do, the boy strolls over to take a look.
The structure is a metre high, and he sees some bits of rusty metal incorporated into its sides. On one face a grille looks to him like the multiple slits of a low-level mail box. So instinctively he stoops and pretends to insert his folded map into one of the slots.
His father takes a photograph of his son’s appropriation of this grille (see Figure 1.1), and momentarily their activities appear to coincide. But this appearance is deceptive: for the man and the boy are taking very different things from their encounter with the hilltop and its concrete and metal protrusion. For the boy this structure is a blank appropriation, a vague analogue for a familiar feature of his everyday acquaintance. For the father these are the redolent ruins of a Royal Observer Corps fallout monitoring post, one of 1,500 set up across the UK during the Cold War, and now lying abandoned since the network was decommissioned in 1991, following the sudden fall of the Berlin Wall.
Built in 1963, the now-weathered concrete ‘cube’ is the exterior of this monitoring post’s access hatch, inside which a ladder leads down into a small subterranean chamber. Here – in the event of a nuclear war – a team of three volunteers would have monitored drifting clouds of nuclear fallout as they passed across their local sector, feeding their observations through to a regional hub, where other bunker-dwellers would have attempted to piece together a national picture of the radioactive contamination of Britain and the locations of its associated nuclear blasts.
Figure 1.1. The Boy and the Bunker (2009, Luke Bennett).
Here, huddled within this hilltop refuge, 50 miles from Newcastle and industrial Tyneside, and 15 miles from RAF Boulmer and its radar command bunker, these observers would have witnessed the thermonuclear flashes of many strikes upon economic and military targets across the northeast of England. Then, confined to their bunker, and with their meagre rations running out, the crew would have awaited further instructions on what to do next, all the time thinking of their unsheltered families – families that they had left behind above ground, and who they probably would never see again.
MAKING SENSE OF AN ENCOUNTER
In the concrete of the bunkers, in the radio towers, the food stores, the dispersed centres of government [we] can read the paranoia of power. This evidence is written on the face of England.
(Laurie 1979, 9)
Writing amid the enhanced nuclear war anxieties of the early 1980s, Peter Laurie (like his contemporary, Duncan Campbell [1982]) tried to materialize the Cold War, by exposing its secret infrastructure: presencing it through the words and pictures of their investigative journalism. Both writers had found that the state’s preparations for Armageddon were hiding in plain sight across the UK – that the Cold War was physically there to see – for those who could learn how to look. Such acts of uncovering were seen to be a key tactic in campaigning against the nuclear state and its weaponry during the Cold War. Occasionally protestors would trace and target facilities like the ROC Post encountered earlier, gluing the locks or spraying anti-war graffiti upon its blank surfaces. However, most passers-by remained blissfully unaware of the importance of such hatches in hilltop fields or of the bunkers that lay beneath.
For the duration of the Cold War, from 1945 to 1991, ‘the world held its breath’ (Isaacs & Dowling 1998), but everyone also got on with their everyday lives. In most parts of the world the Cold War remained a ‘cruel peace’ (Inglis 1991), characterized by the pervasive background fear of a nuclear conflict between the United States (and its NATO allies) and the Soviet Union (and its Warsaw Pact allies). Admittedly, elsewhere in the world (Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Afghanistan, Cambodia to name but a few Cold War conflict zones) the superpowers fuelled proxy wars, battling for regional influence and here people did die. But, despite these ‘hot wars’, the hallmark of the Cold War – what made it different – was (and is) its nuclear stand-off: the US and the USSR locked in an arms race to develop ever greater nuclear destructive capability, with the world taken closest to the brink of all-out war in the early 1960s (the Cuban Missile crisis) and again in the early 1980s with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the arrival of U.S. Cruise Missiles in Western Europe. For 45 years this steady state of geopolitical and affective tension persisted, and it was a condition that seemed permanent. But then suddenly it was all over – and the once top-secret architecture that Laurie and his contemporaries had worked hard to unearth was now exposed through its redundancy.
The Cold War left marks upon both the landscape and popular consciousness, but as Jon Weiner’s (2012) travelogue of Cold War heritage sites has shown, those marks are becoming increasingly feint, and contemporary engagement with the remains of the Cold War is now characterized by a variety of styles and intensities, as echoed in the differential hilltop encounter described earlier. It is now 25 years since the Cold War ended, and a generation has grown up without the anxiety of a ‘wrong sun’ (Coupland 1994, 71) suddenly appearing in the sky. This book’s aim is to examine the variety of ways in which we now remember (or forget) the C
old War through its material traces, in the early 21st century, and to consider how our meaning making is changing, as the Cold War recedes into the ‘past’.
Rather than studying a cross-section the Cold War’s built environment (cf. Schofield et al. 2002; Cocroft & Thomas 2003; Schofield & Cocroft 2007) this book will focus upon one type of the Cold War’s material and cultural ruins: its bunkers, and through this focus will be able to present a sustained and interdisciplinary examination of contemporary engagements with this distinctive type of Cold War structure.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a bunker is ‘a reinforced underground shelter, typically for use in wartime’ (Stevenson 2010). Sharing some affinity with castles and strongholds, what sets the bunker somewhat apart is its focus on sheltering and the act of going underground. Many of the Cold War’s bunkers were completely subterranean, and certainly all sought to utilize the shielding properties of the ground, of rock and/or concrete. All were conceived as places of shelter against the Cold War’s anticipated armed assaults – and whether by nuclear or conventional weaponry. Engineered rather than designed, these were ‘non-architectural’ places, ‘a pure representation of function in poured concrete’ (Vanderbilt 2002, 36). They were intended to be unremarkable, and yet could not help but be distinctive through being unusual in shape, scale, location or purpose.
In its sustained analysis of the significance (and signification) of these structures in the early 21st century, this collection of 14 chapters will acknowledge that the bunker itself, as a brute physical form, is an important part of the story of any encounter with the Cold War’s cultural (and emotional) legacy. The bunker is more than a symbol – a metaphor of superpower stand-off – it is also a bulky, brute thing that assails the senses of any visitor and demands that they contort their bodies in order to navigate its rough surfaces and to probe its dank cavities. The contributors to this collection will show how the material properties of the bunker have shaped its subsequent life (and life span), and framed the strange, unsettling affective qualities of encounters with these relict places. This attentiveness to the bunker’s material-affective agency presents something of the vibrancy ascribed to matter by Jane Bennett (2010), but the human (and human agency) is not submerged in this collection’s attentiveness to materiality, for to dislocate the bunker from its human origins would be to lose something – rather than to gain it. The bunker was made by, and for, us. It was (and given that bunkers still get built – still is) testimony to the Cold War, and mankind’s death drive. That we feel strange within these spaces is to a large degree a conditioned response, but also somewhat atavistic. In this collection, therefore the bunker’s symbolic and material existence is given equal prominence – and their interdependency repeatedly encountered, explored and emphasized.
