In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker

by Luke Bennett

  Schatzki’s Practice Theory offers an approach that caters for all of these dimensions. In recent years, the social sciences have shown a renewed interest in praxis as a central element of human sociality (Reckwitz 2002; Shove et al. 2012). Stemming from Pierre Bourdieu’s (2009 [1979]) theory of practice, Anthony Giddens’s (1997 [1984]) structuration theory and non-representational theory (Thrift 2008), Practice Theory according to Schatzki (2012) has been utilized in geography to work ‘towards a dynamic and activity-oriented understanding of space and place’ (Everts et al. 2011, 327). Schatzki’s rigorous ontological vocabulary can be profitably used to trace vague concepts like ‘memory’, ‘heritage’ or ‘landscape’ as used in historical geography, heritage and memory studies back to concrete social practices and thereby conceptualize them as socio-spatial phenomena.

  While Schatzki’s (2002) ontology offers a complex vocabulary, two central terms suffice to characterize how we experience the world: social practices, that is, routinized action-complexes, on the one hand, contextualize humans, artefacts, nature – in short: the world – to meaningful arrangements. Sociality, Schatzki (2010a, 130) argues, ‘transpires as part of a mesh of practices and arrangements: practices are carried on amid and are determinative of, while also dependent on and altered by, material arrangements’. A practice, in this view, can best be described as a set of structured activities or projects.

  An account of monument protection structured to this effect conceives of the things conservators do and say as a social practice that comprises the projects of (1) survey, (2) assessment, (3) scheduling and (4) conservation. They know how to perform certain tasks and have the knowledge how to perform those because of the relative stability of practices through time and space. Things, like the bunkers, acquire meaning, for example, as relics of the Cold War or as historical landscape artefacts, only within meaningfully organized bodily doings and sayings – that is, social practices. The people, concepts, ideas and materialities that are involved in the practice of monument protection constitute its arrangement. Practices and arrangements are therewith co-constitutive of each other; they form a practice-arrangement bundle that is synonymous with a social phenomenon. While Schatzki conceives of social phenomena as comprised of these entities, his philosophy of sociality is put to use here predominately as an analytic method that is helpful in describing and comparing the range of activities I encountered around the bunkers, as the following examples will show.

  HUNTING: BUNKER HUNTERS AND SITES OF ENTHUSIAST PASTIME

  Luke Bennett (2013a) has identified the political, the taxonomic, the nostalgic and the experiential as the most important discursive formations in bunker-hunting. He argues that the taxonomic and survey-oriented appropriation conducted by bunker hunters has been disregarded by many academic interpretations of urban exploration (Bennett 2011). When observing the ways bunker hunters engage with the hundreds of virtually identical bunkers associated with the obstacle system in Germany, it comes to no surprise that a ‘taxonomic’ mode of enquiry prevails.

  One group of enthusiasts I worked with is dedicated to documenting the system of preconstructed obstacles in its entirety, and thus to portray that system as it was when fully developed towards the end of the 1980s. They gather in an online forum to discuss discoveries of obstacles and bunkers and have created a database that includes the coordinates of the structures, images and a characterization of the surrounding terrain. However, the actual locations of the bunkers are hidden from public access to protect the bunkers from vandalism. Although literally thousands of users have registered with the Internet forum that is exclusively dedicated to relics of the Cold War, only a small core group actually edits the database.4 While the online register is a representation of this group’s success and also a product they are proud of, the bodily practice of bunker-hunting is only hinted at in the forums. Online, a group member would sometimes describe a place he or she has found and others would ask for photographs, a marker in Google Earth or more specific information on the surrounding terrain to double-check whether the data offered is plausible. Again, interviews shed light on the way enthusiasts think of and physically engage with the bunkers. Accordingly, bunker-hunting appears to be a taxonomic practice that involves projects such as (1) desk-based research, (2) fieldwork, (3) drawing maps and (4) public documentation. Research includes enquiries with local authorities and the Wallmeister organization within the Bundeswehr as well as – for some – reading books and researching archives, often via the web, on the subject.

  One participant narrates a day of bunker-hunting like this: he would get up at four in the morning, having prepared his fieldwork trip the day before. Then he would drive a few hundred kilometres to arrive in his target area at dawn and gradually work his way back towards home. He would use a route guidance system to identify rivers and ditches in search of possible sites for obstacles and forest roads in order to find the bunkers. In the time before satnav, he would print out page after page and mark possible spots for investigation. Such a day spent driving, searching and taking photos would last until nightfall, and he would arrive home around midnight, exhausted but satisfied. Then he would be occupied with sorting through pictures, renaming and saving them to his own dedicated folder system, marking spots in Google Earth and filling in new entries on the database for several days to come.

  In my study (Maus 2015a), enthusiasts specialized in different subjects: besides the obstacles project, there is another database focusing on public nuclear shelters,5 a person recording the locations of military load class road signs, a civil defence museum in a private home and not fewer than two societies attending to the history of subterranean structures in Hamburg alone, to name but a few.6 Although bunker-hunting and associated activities appear as a predominantly male pastime (Bennett 2013b), all groups represent their work to the general public through the Internet, exhibitions, guided tours or even printed publications, and there is no apparent gendering in terms of the intended audience towards whom the bunker hunters target their accounts. While oriented towards a public dissemination of their findings through their representational activities, bunker-hunting is also a public activity in the sense that an interest in bunkers is something that can be shared with others, leading to the connection with other practices (e.g. socializing or group discussions).

  While physical activities can be directly observed, practices need to be uncovered through an analytic gaze (Schmidt & Volbers 2011). A practice is not just an empirical situation (i.e. an instance of a doing) but an ontological concept (i.e. it is also a forming of something) that is, in Schatzki’s view (2012), the site of sociality. Even the most solitary enthusiast is, from a Practice Theory perspective, performing an inherently social practice and exhibits a heightened interest in certain things he or she shares with many unbeknownst others. We might say that that lone individual is reiterating (i.e. adding existence to) the object of bunker-hunting practices, the noticing of (or remembering of) these Cold War relics. Also, his or her activities will be largely consistent and intelligible not only to those participating in that same practice, but also to outsiders (and researchers).

  According to Schatzki (1996, 88–130), any social practice consists of routinized ‘doings and sayings’ that share a specific organizational structure. Four concepts help to narrow down this organization of a practice: they are (1) a practical understanding or knowledge of where and how to perform certain tasks (e.g. knowing where and how to find Sperrmittelhäuser), (2) a teleoaffective structure that suggests which tasks are necessary or emotions appropriate to achieve an end (e.g. whether to be serious or light-hearted), (3) possibly explicit rules that have a binding capacity on how to do something and (4) general understandings that are expressed in a number of practices and can thus be likened to cultural dispositions (e.g. how to behave like an expert).

  When Schatzki’s four organizational concepts of practice are applied to this example, we can see that both monument protection and bunker-hunti
ng share similar (1) practical understandings that aim to interpret certain structures as evidence of a time past and, also, of how these should be handled properly in order to ensure their further existence. While this may amount to diverging meanings in the arrangement, for example, concerning different views on which information is necessary to appreciate the bunker as a relic of the Cold War, the (2) general understanding of the bunker as a relic is similar in both practices. Obviously, monument protection abides by the (3) rules set out in law and administrative conduct, which do not apply to enthusiasts (although the enthusiasts have their own implicit rule structures in how they organize and exchange their knowledge). But, more importantly, their (4) teleoaffective structures differ enormously: while state conservators work soberly to legally attest the nature of an object as a ‘historic monument’, bunker hunters enthusiastically pursue a pastime that is often linked to a biographical interest in the military, the Cold War or history more generally (Maus 2015a, 229–231).

  PLAYING: GEOCACHERS AND THE QUEST FOR ‘LOST PLACES’

  While some of the bunkers are regularly used as a storage space by woodworkers or have been re-appropriated as bat refuges by nature conservationists, many just lie there, hardly visible from the forest roads, their earthen covering overgrown with young trees. Even when hiking past a group of these bunkers, the weathered concrete of their portals eludes the eye – and with the help of dense foliage becomes virtually invisible. Discovering these structures by chance will almost immediately prompt impressions of a film set redolent of mystery and adventure. If, then, the visitor finds the massive, blast-proof steel doors standing ajar and inviting access to a passageway into the dark, to the thrall of strange mouldy scents and the prospect of fanciful, revolting or awesome surprises, then this offers up to a thrilling opportunity for exploration.

  Geocaching is a popular leisure activity that, often, exhibits a yearning for this kind of affective experience (Schreiber 2012). Bunkers can be mapped, photographed, measured, explored, climbed and so on. What these actions mean and in which practice they make sense, however, is dependent on the organizational structure of the practice as part of which these actions are performed. Ultimately, however, Practice Theory privileges social explanations at the expense of material agency (Schatzki 2010a). Many geocachers will thrive to create or play an ‘LPC’, or ‘Lost Place Cache’, that leads participants in the game to such a place resonating with an unknown past. ‘Lost Place’ is a pseudo-Anglicism used in German-speaking geocaching and urban exploration communities to refer to abandoned buildings and other ruinous structures. The playful appropriation of such spaces and the ghostly encounters this may afford has been described by Tim Edensor (2005) in great autoethnographic detail.

  But what distinguishes geocaching as a practice that may also frame bunkers as something pertaining to memory, heritage or the past? It is a well-defined social practice that, on my interpretation, exhibits a clear hierarchical structure of projects: (1) hiding a geocache – usually a small plastic container – at an interesting place and publishing its coordinates on an Internet platform, then, as a searcher, (2) planning a geocaching trip, then (3) navigating to the specified coordinates using a GPS device and finding the place in order to finally (4) report one’s success (or failure) to the online community. In these logs, the bunkers regularly evoke reactions like: ‘What a crazy place. Thank goodness, that this has come to an end, exactly 50 years and one day after the Wall went up. Thanks for sharing this place’ or: ‘Thank you for the history lesson!’ (my translations). While only a few cache descriptions were actually written by the ‘owners’ of a cache to tell a story of the past, most are about sharing special places in one’s home country with other players. However, even when the owner of a cache does not offer any contextual information on the bunker – as a rule of thumb, cache creators tend to live near to their caches and may therefore have an overfamiliarity with their location and its history which leads them not to mention such matters in cache descriptions – other players will likely contribute that information in their ‘found-it’ log entries.

  Sometimes these comments or the bunkers themselves will stir enough interest in the geocachers to actually research the history of the place, usually through Internet searches and interviews with local experts.

  Often, however, there will be no references specific to history, let alone the Cold War. The arrangement the bunkers become a part of is rooted in the organizational structure of the game (or rather practice), the bunkers are usually framed within the theme of Lost Place Caches and speculative or purely fictional accounts concerning their purpose are constructed. Bradley Garrett (2011) has characterized a similar phenomenon in urban exploration as ‘assaying history’ within or outside formal historical interpretation. Sometimes, players will contribute authoritative information and personal memories – but there is no way for most players to distinguish these accounts from more creative interpretations. Although neither ‘history’ nor ‘heritage’ is regularly cited as motives among geocachers (O’Hara 2008), the materiality of the bunkers is frequently interpreted as historic, worthy of preservation (from vandalism) and worthy of respect.

  On my interpretation, this expands more conventional conceptions of collective memory. Jan Assmann (2011, 21) states that the ‘participation structure of cultural memory has an inherent tendency to elitism’ and that it is constructed by specialists. I think geocaching or more generally urban exploration – as Garrett (2011) has put forward – shows that a cultural memory that is mediated in symbolic and, often, material forms can be constructed within any pertinent social practice of place-based memory. This also raises questions about the extent to which expert and lay actors exert interpretive power on objectified accounts of the past (Harvey 2013). For archaeologists of the recent past, for instance, meaning-making processes are largely egalitarian in that ‘we can all be archaeologists of the contemporary past, because it is a critical inquiry into what it means to be ourselves’ (Harrison & Schofield 2010, 12). Braaksma et al. (2016) have shown how ‘landscape heritage’ is produced locally and how several modes of meaning production appear to run across a range of different practices. This strand of enquiry conforms with Assmann’s (2011, 18–19) conception of cultural memory as being fostered through continuous performance. His assertion that the making of cultural memory is reserved for experts, however, does not stand these findings: the valorization of the rather prosaic Sperrmittelhäuser even within practices seemingly uninvolved with the production of cultural memory is a case in point. In using the Internet platform, GPS devices, little plastic containers (the arrangement) and through their bodily investigation of the bunkers’ physical presence in the landscape (the practice), geocachers contextualize the bunkers as a place of play and mystery that is deep with (an unknown) history.

  POPULAR HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHIES

  Recording of, hunting for and playing with the Sperrmittelhäuser are all activities that contribute to a meaning-making process and diverging representations of the bunkers. While Bennett (2013a) has traced this ‘concrete multivalence’ through discursive formations (Foucault 2002) in books, films and artwork, I argue that multivalence is constructed in discursive and bodily practices. In the following I want to summarize my analytic approach to further structure my ethnographic narrative of Sperrmittelhäuser hunting set out above with Schatzki’s vocabulary. While the bunkers do acquire different meanings within individual practices, I also find that the practices constitute a congruent social phenomenon homogeneous in social organization but multivalent in meaning. I call this a popular historical geography (of the Cold War) that transcends traditional lay-expert-dichotomies.

  Through each practice, the small munitions bunkers are contextualized in a different arrangement: in geocaching, they are predominantly a place of play and mystery, in bunker-hunting they are as much about heritage as they are about leisure and in monument protection they are potential places of national heritage. I argue that all th
ree practices are practices of memory in which places and artefacts are contextualized as witnesses of a past. In other practices, the bunkers will not acquire historical meaning: in military maintenance practices the bunkers were contextualized in a military arrangement of usability and strategy while in land use planning, for instance, they will be little more than (rather difficult) assets. In contrast to these, monument protection, bunker-hunting, and geocaching share certain general understandings of commemorative culture. That is, they relate to the bunkers as worthy of some form of conservation. Also, the self-conceptions of those carrying out the practices range from professional occupation (monument protection) to serious pastime (bunker-hunting) to innocent play (geocaching). They conceive of the bunkers as artefacts of (potential) historic value, as a special interest topic or as a place of extraordinary experiences. But while these objectives and affective registers (as part of practice organizations) set the scene, they do not determine situational interpretation. The practices do exhibit different and specialist practical understandings of how to record, assess or represent a bunker, though. As I have argued elsewhere in more detail (Maus 2015a), they also show different teleoaffective structures that determine the emotions and ends feasible within each practice. Table 10.1 summarizes the projects and arrangements I identified within these practices.

  The vocabulary taken from Practice Theory has been used here to structure the empirical account clearly in discernible action-complexes. It can be taken further to show that all practices have significant overlaps that constitute a popular historical geography – although individuals may not be involved with each other’s activities. Each of these practices is conducted in a way that is intelligible to outsiders. When asked – and given the shared interest in bunkers or other historical places as evident here – carriers of the practices of monument protection, bunker-hunting and geocaching reflected on how their activities were similar. Moreover, the three practices presented here also use each other’s arrangements and refer to each other’s activities. When, in participant-observation, I tried to be a bunker hunter myself, I regularly relied on geocaches called ‘the bunkers’ or similarly to find their exact locations in the woods. Vice versa, geocache owners often rely on information gathered from the enthusiast Internet forums when they choose to present their cache as a lesson in history. Monument-protection officers report that they cannot possibly find the time to actually visit and assess each and every single one of literally hundreds of preconstructed obstacles and demolition munitions stores: this tedious, time-consuming and costly work conducted by bunker hunters is sometimes acknowledged as relieving them of this duty. In our focus-group discussions, bunker hunters were staggered by the amount of respect and support officers of the monument-protection authorities expressed for their hobby. Indeed, many structures have only been designated as historical monuments because of sustained lobbying by enthusiast groups – despite the rather authoritative and exclusive stance monument protection usually takes.