by Luke Bennett
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Part IV
DEALING WITH THE BUNKER
Hunting, Visiting and Re-making
Chapter 10
Popular Historical Geographies of the Cold War
Hunting, Recording and Playing with Small Munitions Bunkers in Germany
Gunnar Maus
Germany has often been described as having been one of the most densely militarized countries during the Cold War. The Berlin Wall, relics of inter-German border fortifications or the remains of Stasi prisons and other places of memory that represent the German experience of the Cold War and the atrocities of the East German regime all immediately spring to mind in support of this impression. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, memory of the Cold War era in Germany has largely focused on these ‘Eastern’ places (Kaminsky 2007). However, in recent years, places of militarization in former West Germany have attracted increasing attention, including weapons depots, training grounds and defensive emplacements that have now been abandoned by the military, alongside public nuclear shelters, regional seats of government, civil defence stores and emergency reserve hospitals that have exceeded their useful life. All of these have recently become identified as additional – if rather more prosaic – relics of the Cold War.
In this chapter,1 I want to contrast a more traditional historical geography of Cold War relics with popular historical geographies of the Cold War. Academics such as historians, archaeologists and historical geographers represent only one of several communities of practice that have identified the remains of military infrastructure as symbols for the Cold War era. Lay experts, enthusiasts and other involuntary collaborators like geocachers have also been actively engaged in producing histories of the Cold War that are anchored at this more diverse array of sites of Cold War – era militarization. Both material and tangible as well as immaterial and imaginative, I will argue, these meaning-making processes constitute a popular historical geography of the Cold War.
By turning attention to the Sperrmittelhäuser – a specific kind of small munitions storage bunkers abundant at the eastern rim of former West Germany – I will show how state monument conservators, enthusiasts and geocachers create and share an interest in these sites. Their affinity and their collaboration processes, however, are sometimes far from obvious, and I will argue that these commonalities can be seen more clearly if these groups’ activities are analysed through the unique perspective that Practice Theory offers. Applying Practice Theory as advocated by the social philosopher Theodore Schatzki (2012), these seemingly incongruous or even contradicting actions exhibit similar understandings of how to treat material remains of a time past and (in effect, rather than perhaps through original intention) lead to consistent interpretations of structures as Cold War relics. These practices of memory and heritage can thereby be shown to be congruous in form, and yet also producing multivalent representations (Bennett 2013a) of the history of the Cold War, and of its physical remains.
SPERRMITTELHÄUSER AS RELICS OF THE COLD WAR
While the military-industrial complex of the Cold War era arguably produced a large legacy of military establishments, research institutes and civil defence installations of which many are still in operation, there is also a category of disused structures that can be described as ‘relics’ of the Cold War. When recording these as landscape features or historical monuments, however, a more precise concept is needed. Historic England, then known as English Heritage, for instance, defined ‘monuments of the Cold War’ as ‘structures built, or adapted, to carry out nuclear war between the end of the Second World War and 1989. As such, they formed a significant but relatively small part of the post 1945 defence estate’ (Cocroft et al. 2004, 2). While this definition proves too narrow for the German context, where the Cold War was arguably as much about conventional as it was about nuclear confrontation, it shows clearly how an academic conception of relics of the Cold War conceives of them as something qualitatively different from other eras and their material legacies of war.
The example of the Sperrmittelhäuser is a case in point. These are a specific kind of small munitions bunkers used during the Cold War f
or the storage of demolition material (Figure 10.1). These structures formed part of a system of so-called preconstructed obstacles that were built in strategic lines of defence roughly parallel to the Iron Curtain. As such, they were peculiar to the Cold War era, extraordinarily numerous but so blatantly mundane as a structural form that they have hitherto evaded detailed scholarly attention. A short historical geographical appreciation of these bunkers and the preconstructed obstacle system would go on to describe their function and draw both on archival and personal witness. A declassified US Army field manual on ‘countermobility’ measures explains how the system worked:
Preconstructed obstacles are obstacles that are prepared in peacetime for rapid execution once hostilities begin. They are generally designed and constructed not to be obtrusive or interfere with vehicular traffic until executed. Preconstructed obstacles are generally of the following types: (1) Shafts sunk into the roadway at critical areas such as cuts, fills, and defiles, which will later be loaded with demolition to create road craters. (2) Shafts that are constructed for installation of a steel beam instead of demolition. (3) Bridges constructed with hollow demolition chambers in the piers and abutments…. (4) Massive concrete blocks suspended above or beside the roadway at selected locations which can be dropped into the roadway when needed. (Department of the Army 1985, 130 – itemization added)
The majority of the obstacles prepared in German roads were prechamber shaft systems about 4 to 6 metres deep and 60 centimetres in diameter that would be loaded with four 25-kilogram ‘cheese charges’ per 1 metre depth. When detonated, the resulting craters – usually three in a row – would effectively block a roadway for several hours until pioneers worked their way around them. The significant amount of ‘demolition material required for a prechamber shaft system [was] stored in a nearby 5-ton bunker complex and is earmarked for the sole use at its designated obstacle site’ (ibid., 132). The bunkers were built a few hundred metres to several kilometres away from the obstacles. They also contained other material and tools such as detonation cord and blasting caps. When not situated within large military munitions depots or training grounds, the Sperrmittelhäuser were usually erected in state forests. They were not guarded but regularly checked by Wallmeister personnel who maintained the obstacle system.2
Although all bunkers have now been decommissioned, the Bundeswehr was happy to allow their Wallmeister staff to show me around several obstacle sites, even though details of this system, and especially the locations of the obstacles, have never been declassified in Germany. Now obsolete, the prechamber shaft systems and other obstacles are being dismantled for road safety reasons. The sturdy bunkers, however, that have mostly been transferred to state forest authorities or private owners, remain hidden in plain sight. In the following sections I will characterize how the Sperrmittelhäuser are framed as relics of the Cold War in different practices. State monument protection officials, bunker hunters, and geocachers apparently perform very different activities, but questions borrowed from the geography of memory and Practice Theory as an analytic framework help to draw out their structural affinities and co-dependent construction of materially grounded, popular histories of the Cold War.
Figure 10.1. Deep in the Forest: Sperrmittelhaus in the Vicinity of Bad Oldesloe, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany (2013, Gunnar Maus).
For my study I conducted fieldwork in two case studies in the former West Germany (the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein and an area in Hessen, central Germany, referred to during the Cold War as the ‘Fulda Gap’) from 2012 to 2014. I used a broad ethnographic approach which included narrative interviews, participant observation, ethnographies of Internet forums, focus-group discussions and document analysis (Maus 2015a). Analysis was carried out in two steps: first, the material was organized and presented in a realistic representation of observations typical of many ethnographies (Crang & Cook 2007). Second, this was followed by a more formal analysis using Practice Theory.
In the following, I will narrate my fieldwork encounters variously with monument-protection officers, bunker hunters and geocachers, weaving in the perspectives geography of memory and Practice Theory cast on their activities. In doing so I show the affinities between seemingly very different forms of engaging with Cold War relics, each characterized with a markedly different primary motivation: recording, hunting or playing.
RECORDING: STATE MONUMENT PROTECTION AND HISTORICAL LANDSCAPE ARTEFACTS
Studying these activities is essentially studying memory-making processes. The thriving field of geographies of memory has generally characterized memory as a means to socially construct place-based narratives of collective and individual identity (Till 2003; Foote & Azaryahu 2007; Legg 2007; Meusburger et al. 2011; Jones & Garde-Hansen 2012). Memory studies more broadly subscribe to the insight ‘that memory is a process and not a thing’ (Olick 2008, 159). Collective memory ‘is not history, though it is sometimes made from similar material. It is a collective phenomenon but it only manifests itself in the actions and statements of individuals’ (Kansteiner 2002, 180). With a view to artefactual representations of the past, cultural theorist Jan Assmann (2011) distinguishes communicative memory, that is, a social mode of memory based on oral tradition, from cultural memory, which he defines as a cognizant practice of memory that is highly formal, mediated in symbolic forms and performances, and conducted by specialist carriers (e.g. heritage ‘professionals’). In contrast to communicative memory, cultural memory is objectified, institutionalized, and situation-transcendent. In other words, the writing of histories that state monument protection officials practice when they investigate ‘historic’ structures is also always a production of collective or, more precisely, cultural memory. Investigating the ways archaeologists, historians or historical geographers produce their findings is an object of study in its own right.
The ultimate goal of state monument protection, which I have explored with the state offices in Schleswig-Holstein and Hessen, is identifying and preserving historical buildings as sanctioned by law. Because monument protection is devolved to the state level in Germany,3 the authorities of the individual states have hitherto concerned themselves with relics of the Cold War (more generally) and with the system of preconstructed obstacles (in particular) to highly different degrees. While the Bavarian monument-protection authority has been the first to conduct a thorough survey of preconstructed obstacles in an administrative district (Ongyerth 2007), only Hessen has also listed three obstacles as historical monuments. Beyond the obstacle system, the archaeological service for the Rhineland has conducted a more general survey of ‘relics of war’ dating from the First World War to the Cold War era (Hoppe & Wegener 2014). A quick survey with the monument protection authorities in the West German states brought to light that only 37 structures pertaining to the militarization and civil defence of former West Germany were listed as historical monuments. These are 11 public nuclear shelters, 10 special military structures such as communications towers and bunkers, 3 emergency seats of government and 13 preconstructed obstacles and munitions bunkers, respectively. This data is, however, rather unreliable, because the history of the Cold War is a new field to the conservators, and there is no comprehensive and generally accepted formulation of what a relic of the Cold War actually is. Monuments of the Cold War are viewed as unbequeme Denkmale – inconvenient monuments that both represent a difficult history and are difficult to protect from change (Huse 1997; Landesdenkmalamt im Ministerium für Umwelt 2007).
When focusing on the actual bodily activities that monument-protection officers carry out, four discernible projects come into view: (1) survey, (2) assessment, (3) scheduling and (4) conservation. In professional publications (e.g. Ongyerth 2007), assessment of the munitions bunkers is presented as a scientific enterprise: tables of the objects in question have to be compiled; age, rareness and conspicuousness are evaluated; and the bunkers’ locations are plotted in a geographical information system. The ultimate result of this process is a sho
rt entry in a state register of historical monuments where an object might be listed officially: ‘Two munitions bunkers at the Beselberg, munitions bunkers AS-9511 and AS-9512 for the storage of demolition material for the case of defence, 1970, abandoned in 1993’ (BLfD 2014, my translation).
To stop here would be to misrepresent these activities, though. Many routinized actions that are part of monument protection will not be discussed in a professional paper on that topic and become clear only during ethnographies. For instance, the sheer abundance of Cold War structures is an issue, as one conservator argued: since there is neither a comprehensive typology of Cold War structures nor the option to actually survey and assess all structures without additional personnel allocated to a dedicated project, the field remains somewhat neglected.
Foremost, encountering a bunker in the field is an embodied activity involving walking around and climbing the bunker, contemplating the details of the structure and trying the vault-like steel doors for access. A monument-protection authority officer with whom I visited several bunkers exhibited a pronounced understanding of what was important to her professional practice: she scanned blast-proof doors for manufacturer labels and noticed how distinct kinds of lightning rods were used at different bunkers – detailed observations of facts that I had not noticed on my previous visits to those sites due to me not being attuned to her practice and its particular ways of seeing. She was concerned with possible questions that could arise in the project of conservation, for example, how maintenance of the structure could be managed if it was actually to be listed as a historic monument. Her activities, then, are performed through a complex matrix of techniques: bodily and discursive actions, but also through recourse to monument registers, heritage laws and regulations, professional publications, photo cameras and so on. The framing of the munitions bunkers as cultural heritage through public monument protection relies on all of these practices as well as upon people, concepts and materialities.
