by Luke Bennett
The 1990s saw significant efforts by English Heritage to catalogue the heritage of the Second World War and Cold War archaeological remains (Cocroft & Thomas 2003), and an enlisting many willing amateur combat archaeologists and military historians to do so. Since the mid-1990s there has been increasing engagement by artists and creative writers with the Cold War’s abandoned sites, and we have seen the rise of Cold War heritage ‘attractions’ and of urban exploration spurring an experiential bunker-hunting. This multivalent signification of once-secret, unnoticed places, and their subsequent abandonment as purposeless has required active steps, for to find beauty, poetry or significance in the military infrastructure of the 20th century is also to open a new chapter in landscape aesthetics, for it is a direct counter to the pastoralism of the original proponents such as W. G. Hoskins who decried in his pioneering work The Making of the English Landscape (originally published in 1954):
the obscene shape of the atom-bomber, laying a trail like a filthy slug upon Constable’s and Gainsborough’s sky. England of the Nissen hut, the ‘pre-fab’, and the electric fence, of the high barbed wire around some unmentionable devilment…. Barbaric England of the scientists, the military men, and the politicians: let us turn away. (1985, 299)
The research and analysis presented in this book finds this meaning making to be a willed, embodied practice. The meanings ‘found’ by these endeavours are not inherent, but they are chosen, constructed and performed by the act of exploration and interpretation (Smith 2006). Thus the contributions to this volume are concerned with setting out a reflexive account of their and others’ active making of meaning in their affective engagements with the materiality of abandoned Cold War – era bunkers, and of how new representational codes emerge and evolve through collaborative action within a variety of ‘communities of practice’ (Wenger 1998).
Academic bunker hunters are one such community of practice. This collection grew out of a day-long session at the 2014 Royal Geographical Society annual conference in London, which I convened with John Beck and Ian Klinke, which (to our surprise and delight) attracted enough interest for us to be able to present 18 papers. Over the past decade the bunker has become a fertile ground for the study of meaning making, place-attachment, hobby practices, social materiality and heritage studies. Accordingly, this book’s collection of chapters surveys a broad spectrum of contemporary engagements with the remains of the Cold War’s bunkers, ranging across anthropology, archaeology, architecture, fine art, geography, tourism and heritage research. This book rests upon a resolute assumption that as a complex and materialized social formation, no one discipline can have a monopoly upon the interpretation of bunkers.
The contributors to the volume are all aware that they too are engaged in signifying these ruins of the Cold War. We, as academics, artists and heritage professionals, are all ourselves engaged in appropriating the bunker, projecting meaning onto it, using it for its own projects and enquiries, and this book is itself part of that enterprise and no one can ever rise above genre-forming practices of meaning making, but their actions inevitably evolve and adapt the ways in which the object of their attention is positioned and engaged. Accordingly the chapters in this collection are reflexive: often explicitly self-aware of the writer’s own role in the valorization of both bunker-hunting and bunkers themselves.
To date the majority of academic analysis of the Cold War has tended to be shaped by the Cold War’s own geopolitical logics: to see the Cold War and its history as primarily a matter of international relations. This has put politics very much at the centre of the analysis, but because of this focus there has been a relative deficit of more affective and/or site-based studies of what the Cold War meant ‘on the ground’ (in terms of its physical sites), how it has (or indeed has not) been embraced as heritage and how the Cold War bunker – and its remains – reverberates through popular culture. Accordingly, our focus in this collection is to connect mainstream Cold War studies to other ways of approaching its object of concern by foregrounding embodied (affective material) engagements with its sites and structures, and with the meaning-making practices associated with the sense of place created through the exploration of these ruins.
STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
While each chapter presents its own topic and disciplinary focus, the studies presented here all ultimately treat purposive, identity-forming engagements with bunkers as meaning-invested material culture (Miller 2009) and in doing so have an affinity to recent work on the geographies of archaeological and architectural enthusiasm (Geoghegan 2009; Craggs et al. 2013). Bunker hunters invest emotion, energy and identity into the pursuit of their quarry, understanding why and how they do so is a key concern for the authors assembled here.
I conclude this Part I – ‘Introducing the Bunker: Ruins, Hunters and Motives’ – with the next chapter, ‘Entering the Bunker with Paul Virilio: The Atlantic Wall, Pure War and Trauma’, in which I discuss the importance of the seminal bunker-hunting of French cultural theorist Paul Virilio, who between 1958 and 1965 systematically visited, photographed and researched the imposing bunker formations of the Nazi Atlantic Wall, and who did so at the height of the Cold War. I outline Virilio’s affective engagement with these bunkers and their impact upon his later theorizing and argue that this compulsive hunting can be shown to be the product of traumatic wartime experiences. I then use this finding to argue that compulsive bunker-hunting of the Cold War’s shelters may also be understood in this way, with even Virilio having described the nuclear anxiety-based trauma of the Cold War as greater than that of the Second World War.
Part II – ‘Looking at the Bunker: Representation, Image and Affect’ – then presents three chapters written by artists, who each explore how established and newly emergent practices of representation engage with the Cold War’s bunkers and what they formerly, and may now, stand for (both for them and for others). First, in ‘Peripheral Artefacts: Drawing [Out] the Cold War’, Stephen Felmingham discusses his use of experimental drawing techniques to access the ‘hidden in plain sight’ uncanny qualities of now-abandoned ROC Posts. In doing so Felmingham shows how his bunker-entering reconnaissance accessed his sublimated childhood trauma of growing up in East Anglia in the 1980s amid USAF and RAF nuclear bases, pointing to the potency of material and spatial triggers to memory and feeling. Next, in ‘Sublime Concrete: The Fantasy Bunker, Explored’ scenographer and sound artist Kathrine Sandys explores the atmospheres, properties and possibilities of the Cold War bunker, situating an account of her own installation-based works, within a wider discussion of the fact versus fiction confusion of these places, and their link to an emergent military sublime. Sandys finds in these remains a blankness which calls for meaning making to be undertaken actively by those who engage with the bunkers and their phenomenological properties. Finally, in ‘Processual Engagements: Sebaldian Pilgrimages to Orford Ness’, Louise K. Wilson considers the ways in which a variety of artists have engaged the iconic Orford Ness site, and the extent to which those engagements have come to be conditioned by certain strong, framing tropes. Specifically, Wilson considers the enduring influence of W. G. Sebald’s melancholic reading of this site and its most iconic remnant structures. While attentive to recent departures from this representational mould, Wilson chronicles the persistence of engagements which seek to foreground (and/or create) an inaccessible (and open, plastic) ‘mystery’ for the site – thereby producing art ‘about’ the site which relies more on imagination than upon deep engagement with its archival or material facticity.
In Part III – ‘Embracing the Bunker: Identity, Materiality and Memory’ – the concern is with how an emergent attentiveness to the physicality of the world and our ‘entanglement’ with it (Hodder 2012) (this being the sense in which ‘materiality’ is used in this collection) affects the way in which we can account for human engagements with the remains of Cold War bunkers. The first two chapters in this part examine the entanglement of the material world and the identity o
f the explorer within the act of interpreting Cold War remains, with each author using experimental writing techniques to destabilize seemingly conventional forms of investigatory narrative. First, in ‘Torås Fort: A Speculative Study of War Architecture in the Landscape’, artist Matthew Flintham uses the techniques of speculative fiction to unsettle an account of a geologist’s compulsive analysis of the materialities of the remains of a Norwegian coastal battery, fusing the styles of the natural sciences and horror writing to do so. Flintham’s account reflects the ‘weird realism’ stylistics and concerns of contemporary writers (like DeLanda 1997; Negarestani 2008; Bogost 2012; Harman 2012) who each ascribe ominous, ‘hidden in plain sight’ posthuman mystery to seemingly dumb brute banal geological objects.
Then, in ‘Bunker and Cave Counterpoint: Exploring Underground Cold War Landscapes in Greenbrier County, West Virginia’, anthropologist María Alejandra Pérez uses techniques of counterpoint and ethnographic surrealism to juxtapose her autoethnographic accounts of visits to the US Congress bunker built beneath the luxury Greenbrier Resort with the remains of a far more rudimentary public nuclear shelter located within the Organ cave complex, 14 miles away. In doing so Pérez emphasizes the iterative, unsettled process of meaning making, infusing her account with the bleed between these places’ multiple histories and uses and also the provocations of her own identity: both as an immigrant with a very different cultural experience of the Cold War and as a caver.
Thereafter, two chapters address the role of affective materialities in the production of collective identities via practices of recuperation enacted at particular material sites of encounter. First, in ‘Recuperative Materialities: The Kinmen Tunnel Music Festival’, cultural geographer J. J. Zhang explores the important role of the material properties of the Zhaishan tunnel complex, part of a defensive network of fortifications protecting the Taiwanese island of Kinmen from Chinese invasion. Only a few miles from the Chinese mainland the island was the scene of repeated exchanges of artillery fire during the Cold War. Now decommissioned, the tunnel is the site of a classical music festival, which Zhang analyses in terms of the affective material recuperation afforded by the acoustic properties of the tunnel itself, ascribing to it a sensuous agency and showing how ‘rapproachment tourists’ find the tunnel to act as a healing sensorium – an externalized seat of sensation where humans and tunnel come together. Finally, in ‘Once Upon a Time in Ksamil: Communist and Post-Communist Biographies of Mushroom-Shaped Bunkers in Albania’, archaeologist Emily Glass considers the seemingly ambivalent relationship of Albanians with the material legacy of the hundreds of thousands of small bunkers constructed upon their landscape during the Cold War – the physical embodiment of Cold War – era Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha’s defensive, isolationist paranoia. Glass shows how a strict control over knowledge about the bunker production during the Cold War era gave way to a multivalent afterlife for these structures, in which the local appropriated them for mundane and illicit uses while tourists and the tourism industry adopted them as a symbol of Albania.
In Part IV – ‘Dealing with the Bunker: Hunting, Visiting and Re-making’ – the attention shifts to how meaning making is organized. In the first pair of chapters, the focus is upon heritage practices and specifically the lay/professional divide. First, cultural geographer Gunnar Maus applies Theodore Schatzki’s practice theory to an analysis of the parallel bunker-hunting by heritage officials, bunkerologists and geocachers in the former West Germany in ‘Popular Historical Geographies of the Cold War: Hunting Recording and Playing with Small Munitions Bunkers in Germany’. Maus finds structural affinities in the ways in which these three communities of bunker hunters seek out and interact with Sperrmittelhäuser: demolition charge storage bunkers that formed part of West Germany’s ‘preconstructed obstacle’ system of Cold War defence. Maus explores the important difference between motivations (which here were divergent) and methods of practice (which both demonstrate affinities and evidence of collaboration between these diverse communities of bunker hunters). Then in ‘A Nice Day Out?’: Exploring Heritage (and) Tourism Discourses at Cold War Bunker Sites in Britain’, tourism studies researcher Inge Hermann reports her study of the ways in which visitors engage with UK Cold War bunker ‘attractions’, highlighting the ways in which individual visitors actively form their own interpretations of Cold War ‘attraction’ sites. Hermann contrasts the vitality of this active reading by audiences with what she regards as a rather closed approach imposed by heritage professionals, arguing that the effect of an ‘authorised heritage discourse’ in relation to the rendering of Cold War bunkers as ‘heritage’ pays insufficient regard to how individual visitors react to these places.
Hermann’s analysis is then followed by Rachael Bowers’s and Kevin Booth’s discussion of the decisions necessitated in their curation of English Heritage’s York Cold War bunker in ‘Preserving and Managing York Cold War Bunker: Authenticity, Curation and the Visitor Experience’. This both sets up a counterpoint to Hermann’s argument – with Bowers and Booth presenting an insider’s account of the emergence of the Cold War as heritage’ discourse and also their attentiveness to matters of affect and materiality (alongside discourse) within their reflexive analysis of their own experience of presenting this place as a heritage ‘attraction’. In their focus on the physical limits of curation, and the affective potentialities of place (re)making, Bowers and Booth then set the scene for Dutch architect, Arno Geesink, who considers the spatial possibilities and limitations of his proposals to redevelop a Dutch former nuclear shelter into a public events space in Atoombunker Arnhem: An Architect’s New Uses for Old Bunkers. Geesink shows how his search for sites for redevelopment is informed by his interest in military history, once more disrupting a simplistic dichotomy of enthusiast versus professional bunker hunters.
In the concluding chapter, ‘Presencing the Bunker: Past, Present and Future’, I pull together the book’s themes and contributions in order to examine the tension between on the one hand the politically inspired desire to reveal and preserve the bunker as an unmasked cypher of state power, and on the other hand, pressures (and enticements) to re-appropriate bunker ruins and to move beyond Cold War memorialization. This enquiry into the question of the bunker’s futurity pits concerns for authenticity and sincerity against the opportunities of plasticity and playfulness, a quandary that appears to affect many contemporary engagements with the ruins of the Cold War bunker.
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