In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker

by Luke Bennett

  VICARIOUS ENGAGEMENTS

  Always adept at utilizing still and moving images as research evidence, Lehmann’s digital video footage of Torås shows her children and their cousins scrambling over the larvitkite rock formations within the Torås compound, seeking out hidden gun emplacements, tunnels and bunkers. They grasp the smooth rocks, pulling themselves over improvised defensive structures, kicking barricades of granite and poured concrete, and climbing rusted iron frameworks that swing and lurch under their weight. The steady camerawork suggests that Lehmann is at ease with their reckless engagements in redundant military space, studying their hands as they root for anchor points and footholds. Her own apparent reticence in this place is checked by a belief that children, including her own, should learn by doing and damaging themselves, and ‘should know the pain of the earth as their own’ (Lehmann 2010, 19).

  Figure 6.2. Torås Kommandoplasse (2010, Matthew Flintham) (four frame captures from Lehmann’s footage of Torås).

  CATASTROPHIC BOMBARDMENTS

  Like many geologists’, Lehmann’s imagination extends to the formation of the earth itself as a body forged in the hadean tumult over four and half billion years ago, and its continuing, precarious transit through the interstellar Oort cloud. However, as a subscriber to catastrophic theories of geological transformation, Lehmann also recognized that cosmic dust and devolatilized debris have also significantly affected the geology and atmospheric evolution of the earth. To demonstrate, Lehmann often cited Clube and Napier’s work on the Tunguska event of 1908, as an example of how ‘geochemical anomalies [such as Nickel and iridium in the case of Tunguska] at mass extinction boundaries should in general be diagnostic of repeated passage of the Earth through a complex of dust and planetesimals, and not impact alone (or even primarily)’ (Clube & Napier 1984, 954).

  Perhaps these thoughts ran through Lehmann’s mind as she filmed her daughter’s high top trainers grinding the pulverized larvikite beneath her feet; such particles may contain geochemical signatures of distant Nebulae from when the earth passed through the spiral arm of the Milky Way over the last 500 million years. Likely candidates might be cyanopolyyne, a chemical group detected in the nearby Taurus Molecular Cloud-1, or tholins abundantly drifting in the cosmic medium – complex molecules which had long been suspected as a building block of life on earth.

  ‘Taurus’, Lehmann remarks in her journal, was also the pet name given to the hilltop command centre by her children, a place growing in familiarity as a playground for them. In fact, the Norwegian name Torås is derived from the name Tor or Thor in English, and ås, meaning ‘hill’. Thor’s Hill seems somehow fitting for a place of such thunderous potential, a landscape weaponized against invaders and measured in artillery trajectories equations.

  MINERALIZATION

  In a telling analysis of Lehmann’s work, Bjørnskau remarks that while,

  The close mapping of rhomb porphyry lava eruptions across the Vestfold graben (a cluster of which has since become known as the Lehmann’s Formation) is exemplary, the study displays a curious overabundance of analytic detail, including a meticulous classification of feldspar crystal sizes and densities. (Bjørnskau 2004, 215)

  This obsession with the Vestfold landscape betrays an intimate knowledge of personal discovery, as if she had walked every inch of the region and turned every stone. And yet, in her highly speculative and largely overlooked paper, Magmatism, Thermodynamics and Mineralisation, Lehmann is curiously dismissive of her own specialism or perhaps reached a critical point in her understanding of it (Lehmann 1994, 17). She quotes Manuel DeLanda’s A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History:

  The thin rocky crust on which we live and which we call our land and home is perhaps the earth’s least important component. The crust is, indeed, a mere hardening within the great system of underground lava flows …, organizing themselves into large ‘conveyor belts’…. It is almost as if every part of the mineral world could be defined simply by specifying its chemical composition and its speed of flow: very slow for rocks, faster for lava. (DeLanda 2011, 257–258, emphasis in original)

  In Magmatism, we also find Lehmann drawn to DeLanda interpretation of the thermodynamic principle of phase transitions: here heat is still a catalyst for a change in the state of matter (from solid to liquid to gas, for instance), but it also animates the fluctuations between mineral substance and organic life. In this scenario, each element of organic life is also a temporary coagulation or ‘deceleration’ of matter-energy derived, in part, from the inferno beneath. Furthermore, DeLanda suggests that around 500 million years ago,

  some of the conglomerations of fleshy matter-energy that made up life underwent a sudden mineralization, and a new material for constructing living creatures emerged: bone. It is almost as if the mineral world that had served as a substratum for the emergence of biological creatures was reasserting itself, confirming that geology, far from being left behind as a primitive stage in earth’s evolution, fully coexisted with the soft gelatinous newcomers. (Delanda 2011, 26, emphasis in the original)

  If the endoskeleton is a form of mineralization, and the human species had undergone a form of a geological infiltration, then the next stage would be the creation of mineral exoskeletons – clay bricks, mortar, concrete, architecture – for the preservation and defence of vulnerable flesh. Constantly vulnerable to attack, the human species became adept at mobilizing and reconfiguring local geologies for their own protection.

  For Lehmann, this was not simply an attempt to conflate the catastrophic violence of geology with the gradual systematization of human defence and militarization. No, quite simply, it was an attempt to establish that the two were related by the transfer of energy and the transformation of matter. Take out the metaphors, and the violence of change is plain to see.

  As she stood before the hilltop Kommandoplasse, perhaps she imagined it almost as an indivisible hybrid of geological ferment and human agency. However, according to Lehmann,

  ‘agency’ is a loaded term which over-values and privileges the intentionality of the organic over the inorganic. The mineral world, in fact, is perpetually animated by self-organizing systems and spontaneous structural generation. Igneous rock, for example, constitutes 75% of the earth’s mantle and is a source of intense creative production, melting as magma and reforming as solid feldspar or peridotite crystals. Organic life, by comparison, is limited to a fractionally thin strata of the Earth’s solidified, crystalline crust. (Lehmann 2001, 110)

  Certain commentators have proposed that this ‘object-orientated’ or even nihilistic world view is symptomatic of a broader disillusionment with the debates and denials of climate change and the particularities of defining the ‘anthropocene’ (or the misanthropocene, as Lehmann often referred to it) as a new epoch in planetary history. Lehmann may well concur with Paul Crutzen and co-researchers that mankind has entered a ‘ “Great Acceleration” of global environmental change’ which has a measurable impact on geological strata (Zalasiewicz et al. 2010, 2230), but her more recent preoccupation with globalized militarism as a driver for ecological catastrophe points to a certain fatalism in her research, or even an endgame of sorts.

  MILITARIZATION

  Curiously, other journal entries for this period remained upbeat: Lehmann continued to marvel at her children’s love of Torås Fort and their ability to move freely across the Torås site, naïvely oblivious to the history of fascism and the oppressive weight of its military architecture. She watches as they scramble up iron ladders and up over the high granite ridge, walking its length as if tracing the spine of an immense, beached leviathan. Lehmann’s children had no knowledge of Organisation Todt, the Nazi engineering, building and logistics division which constructed many of the Atlantic Wall fortifications in Norway and across Europe using the forced labour of prisoners and country folk. They surely had only scant knowledge of the aerial and naval attacks of Operation Weserübung that quickly led to the Nazi occupation of Norway between 1940 and 1
945, or the installation of the puppet government led by the fascist Vidkun Quisling, or the forced deportation of over 2,000 Jews, many of whom died in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Lehmann also doubted whether her children knew that the naval cannons that once pointed out to see here were made by Bofors of Sweden, a country that had remained neutral during the entire war while, in fact, continuing to supply vast quantities of iron ore to the Nazis. Nor could they know that in 1940 the British themselves were only days away from invading Norway, an operation that was intended to stifle the German advance and pave the way for the obliteration of the Swedish iron ore mines in Gällivare.

  The records at the local library suggested that Torås Fort saw little action during the war, an outpost animated only by mundane routines and pointless exercises. After liberation by the Allies in 1945, the base reverted to use by the Norwegian military, and during the Cold War the four Bofors cannons continued to point out to sea, an absurd gesture of defiance against an improbable Soviet invasion from the south. Norwegian soldiers and special forces units continued to be trained here until 1999, when finally the site was moth-balled, remaining under care and maintenance for a further decade before being released back to the municipality in 2010 (Sørlie 2009).

  While Lehmann showed no hesitation in writing about Torås in her journal, she allowed her children and their cousins to conduct the actual ‘fieldwork’, such as it was. Or rather, their naivety constituted a kind of ‘anti-fieldwork’ in which their unfettered, sensuous engagement would, perhaps, dispel or counter the ever-present phantasm of Nazi ideology. There was also the possibility, however, that she was unwittingly using the children as a buffer to limit her own psychic proximity to Torås and its implications. Lehmann’s own explanation is somewhat complex: ‘It may be flippant to say’, she wrote in her journal, ‘that a person ceases to be an autonomous agent once they have children, but this is certainly true for me. In recent weeks I’ve come to regard my children, and even their cousins, as a constellation of extended sensors, experiencing the world, particularly the fort, in ways I cannot’ (Lehmann 2010, 154). The function of the camera within this assemblage, she goes on to explain, is to provide what the film-maker Patrick Keiller has called ‘an illusory coherence’, one in which the moving image medium unites the various heterogeneous elements of lived space (Keiller 2007, 122). In this sense, film recomposes or perhaps stabilizes the nebulous components of Lehmann’s experience of Torås or perhaps even her experience of military space.

  MILITARY GEOLOGY

  We can only presume that this island haven was intended as a retreat away from the pressures of work, away from Lehmann’s most recent research on groundwater contamination at military bases in the United States and the United Kingdom. Her experience was sought to evaluate the filtration of contaminants into the water table and through fluid-bearing fractures into the bedrock. The purpose of this project was to establish a methodology that could be applied to other sites of militarization and other terrains and battle zones around the world. By all accounts, Lehmann’s preparations involved a broad study of 20th-century military tactics and strategies on land, including the storage, discharge and decay of armament, and a detailed analysis of military infrastructure, logistics and demilitarization.

  Lehmann would appreciate, therefore, that before any military operation takes place, planners always consider the terrain to be encountered. The geography of a landscape is considered in tactical and strategic terms, as a challenge and as an asset for any operation. Moreover, the material composition of the landscape is also considered as a resource for aiding maneuvers and logistics, but also for the construction of temporary or permanent defensive structures. Terrain analysis – the study of landforms, geological features and plant coverage – is a process of attributing or changing the symbolic value of a landscape. As Rachel Woodward argues,

  th[e] military reading of the landscape is a rationalistic one, possibly even a masculine one where seeing and knowing are conflated…. Once understood, the features are renamed; hills and streams become barriers, hedges turn into hideouts. (Woodward 2004, 106)

  In their increasingly meticulous survey of Torås, Lehmann and the children discover a series of small quarries blasted into the larvikite granite, each one a gaping wound in the otherwise-undulating landscape of rounded peaks and gorges. In her journal entry for the day, she surmises that the quarries were used to create rocks for building the four main artillery emplacements on the high ground, and for the many smaller redoubts dotted around the area. Huge quantities of rock would also have been pulverized into aggregate for concrete.

  The towering Kommandoplasse, she notes, is in fact a granite hill with a synthetic peak sculpted entirely out of loose rocks and poured concrete, ‘a marvel of improvised architecture and engineering, and a catastrophe of geological redeployment’ (Lehmann 2010, 204). Hundreds of tonnes of concrete would surely have been needed to create such a ‘perfect monstrosity of Nazi vernacular architecture’. In fact, despite its mesmerizing fusion of military modernism and plutonic undulation, Torås may well have been, as Paul Hirst suggests, a Nazi folly:

  Hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete and many heavy guns were wasted in Norway … and in the Channel Islands. Had these heavy batteries been sited in Normandy, and had the divisions wasted in Norway (twelve divisions formed the garrison there …) been posted on that coast, then the allied invasion may well have failed. (Hirst 2005, 210)

  Building as if for a thousand-year Reich, Nazi military design incorporates the aesthetic and the monumental, characterized by a clearly defined strain of ‘Political Romanticism’ as Carl Schmitt would have it (Schmitt 1986). Concrete is the abiding material here, blasted from the nearby landscape, pulverized and mixed with cement to form a plastic and fluid medium. Granite returns once more, albeit temporarily, to its protean viscous state.

  As a child of the Cold War, Lehmann’s understanding of Torås was also coloured by memories of claustrophobic powerlessness as the nuclear superpowers threatened pre-emptive strikes and mutually assured destruction (MAD). Maybe she even had a precocious sense of being part of the first generation to grasp the possibility of planetary destruction. Like those of her generation, the material plasticity of Lehmann’s brain was shaped and warped by the ever-imminent and endlessly deferred cataclysm of nuclear war. In this sense, she felt a kinship with Torås which also seemed to be the material embodiment of these nebulous fears: co-opted, transformed and mobilized by the Cold War, but as a chronicler of the site, Lehmann also struggled to articulate an uncomfortable sense of being, in fact, an organic, mobile appendage of Torås.

  THE DISCOVERY

  By this stage, Lehmann’s journal notes are progressively more impassioned, full of extended metaphors and ominous prose. The methodical research and commitment to rational analysis has largely been abandoned in favour of disjointed conjecture on militarization and dismal ruminations on violent geological forces.

  The 23rd July marks a further decline in Lehmann’s well-being, a day when she and the children were examining one of the recently discovered quarries hidden in a gorge at the foot of the great Kommandoplasse. There they found an exposed vein of rhomb porphyry glistening red with a sheen of fetid water running from a spring within the granite hill. It is possible to infer from Lehmann’s previous research that this ‘weeping sore’ shouldn’t be there at all, an anomaly several kilometres from the nearest volcanic eruption of rhomb porphyry. The mental subterranean landscape that Lehmann had carefully constructed over the course of her career, with all its sunken faults of ancient strata, its chambers and fissures of magma reaching out from the bulging, molten asthenosphere, had experienced a sudden seismic shock. It now seemed that the military fort looming over them from the hill above had been built on an ancient magma conduit. She guessed that it was a rogue tendril emanating from a larger vent somewhere under the sea or the mainland nearby.

  An unwelcome association formed between the military edifi
ce before her and the netherworld beneath. Lehmann imagined this would have appealed to members of the quasi-fascist Wahrheitsgesellschaft (The Society of Truth) – more widely known as the Vril Society (Ley 1947). This secret order of influential Berliners immersed themselves in the fictional novel The Coming Race (1871) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, in which a mining engineer encounters a subterranean civilization of super-beings who harness a mysterious energy-form, Vril (Bulwer-Lytton 2010). The Society believed that Bulwer-Lytton was, in fact, trying to communicate an occult truth with his novel about a master race and its ability to harness elemental powers. For a moment she could almost believe the Nazis had not simply built this edifice, but had summoned something from the geological past or accelerated a plutonic morphological process.

  Pseudo-science and occult ‘truths’ made Lehmann depressed. But what made her more depressed was that the discovery of rhomb porphyry at Torås had totally disrupted her geological understanding of the Vestfold landscape. Furthermore, she suspected that the fluid oozing from the vein at the foot of the Kommandoplasse was not water but a hazardous petrochemical leaking from inside the bunker.

  SURFACE TENSION

  By late July, the children are largely absent from the video footage, having ‘abandoned the family project’, as Lehmann described in her journal, to spend time with their grandparents on the mainland (Lehmann 2010, 210). Alone now, she continues the survey of Torås Fort, inching her way around the precarious face of the Kommandoplasse, getting ever closer to its cracked concrete crust, an aerial reconnaissance of an entirely militarized world. The mythical and monumental stature of Nazi bunkers described by Paul Virilio in Bunker Archeology (1994) would have been lost on Lehmann at this point as she embarked on an increasingly granular analysis of the site. So too would the prose of George Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe with its Orkney community pushed aside to make way for the quasi-military facility ‘Black Star’ reaching deep into the island of Hellya: