In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker

by Luke Bennett

  Jonathan Veitch (2010) takes the point even further – reflecting on his visit to the remains of Survival Town, the mock-up cluster of buildings and their mannequin inhabitants, blasted in the civil effects tests held deep in the heart of the Nevada Test Site (NTS) in the 1950s. He admits that there is something erotic in the fascination he feels there: ‘These test houses at the NTS convey, more palpably than any other place I can think of, our longing for apocalypse, the desire to bring everything down around us’ (335). Meanwhile Marc Lafleur’s (2007) ethnographic study of the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings at the National Atomic Museum, Los Alamos, picks out the ‘intimate spectatorship’ and ‘fleeting pit-stops’ (2007, 211) characteristic of touristic/heritage spectacle at Cold War attractions. For him these sites ‘constitute the fleeting and emptied out moments of politics siphoned through shock, sympathy and schadenfreude’ (214). Schadenfreude – because part of the experience – is the (sublime-based) knowledge that yours was not the body that was hurt: shock in the sense of an aestheticized spectacle, the ultimate effect of which is to anaesthetize through overstimulation (in the sense described by Walter Benjamin). Finally, in Sympathy, Lafleur leaves us some glimmer of hope: that such places have the potentiality at least to be ‘gathering points in the new public sphere, places where a “we” can form, however temporarily, in the bloody haze of one more disaster your body has averted’ (215).

  In Sympathy, then, Lafleur is arguing for the possibility of an empathic politics, forged within an engagement with the affective-material conditions of the ruins of Cold War’s traumatic sites. As this collection has argued, the bunker is fertile (and necessary) ground for study – and not just politico-historically or taxonomically, but also existentially, sensorially and through an attentiveness to the importance of affective-material object-subject relations. In Bunker Archeology Paul Virilio (1994) managed to formulate a mode of bunker-hunting that was all of these things at the same time. And that engagement seems to have been driven by trauma of the Second World War – and a consequent fetishization of both the symbolism and the materiality of the Nazi bunkers comprising the Atlantic Wall. I have argued in my contributions to this book that in the aftermath of the Cold War we should see bunker-hunting as – for some – an equivalent and potentially therapeutic working-out of trauma. This working-out spurs a questing that seeks to render known through physical attendance the previously secret places haunted in the Cold War due to their hiddenness.

  It is therefore important to presence the bunker – both for what it tells us about the Cold War (global and localized) and for what it tells us about ourselves existentially and how our future is intersected by the legacy of the past and the (good and bad) dreams of the future (and the bunker’s role in that). This requires an adept blending of the affective (making the place touch the visitor), world-embracing materiality and an openness to meaning making. This collection takes the view that presentation of such ruins is about enabling experience and meaning making – by ensuring some degree of provocation. For John Schofield heritage has an under-acknowledged ‘discord value’ (2005, 111) which can be used to trigger (variously) debate, feeling, memory, creativity and/or thoughts of the future.

  Virilio chose to portray his project as archaeological and encountered hostility because locals either regarded the Atlantic Wall sites as not old enough to fit that label, or too malevolent (or ubiquitous) to rank as heritage worthy of preservation. Notably Ian Strange and Ed Walley (2007) report similar hostility in their study of Cold War ruins in Yorkshire. Yet for those engaged in bunker-hunting (and whether as taxonomic hobbyist, interpretive artist, thrill-seeking urban explorer or trauma-processing ruminator) the act of engaging with these Cold War relics is evidently performed in the present and gives something to current and future identity and meaning. It is, thus, an instance of the archaeology of the contemporary past that Rodney Harrison and John Schofield (2010) map out, in which no physical digging is required, and anyone can do it: all it requires is an active, engaged approach to analysing the places of our present (and very recent past) in order to better understand ourselves.

  But the bunker is not dead. History shows us that the bunker rarely leaves the scene at the war’s end – instead it mutates, through military or civilian appropriation (particularly given the difficulty of physical erasure). The bunker is still with us – it is not a lost historical object. And we still have the Pure War condition (now framed as a ‘War on Terror’) with its attendant bunkerization of cities via the ‘New Military Urbanism’ (Graham 2011). We have developed very definite stylistics about what we expect of fictional and real villains and their bunker-lairs, and this appears to feed back into our post–Cold War sensibilities. Thus everything is mixed up, in a tangle of fact and fiction.

  HOW CAN ACADEMIC BUNKER STUDIES HELP?

  Scholarship can help to untangle this web, or at least to start to understand this concatenation, and thereby work to reconciling pasts, presents and futures. In the early 21st century we have the opportunity – and a need – to investigate the Cold War bunker as a material and symbolic entity. During the Cold War the bunker held a powerful role over our lives, but sat silently, with its ability to hide in plain sight. Whether now a ruin or not, some are taunted by the mysteries of bunker. This book has sought to understand the roots and forms of this thrall, and its modes of expression. It has also accepted that this book is itself part of the meaning making inflicted upon the bunker, with academic bunker-hunting exhibiting its own bunker-hunting logics. Understanding the bunker is an inherently interdisciplinary endeavour, as reflected by the authors’ range of disciplinary affiliations. This cross-disciplinary collaboration has brought together diverse methods with which to interrogate the bunker as a phenomenon: design, drawing, photography, survey, questionnaire, interview, archival work, autoethnography, ethnography, discourse analysis, archaeological excavation, creative (and academic) writing and taxonomic categorization. This collection has shown how each of these methods produces an academic account of bunker ruins that is meaningful for the author’s discipline, but which is also capable of connecting with other disciplines and their methods and debates.

  My editorial curation and juxtaposition of the assembled contributions has been a further instalment in my investigation of the logics of multivalent meaning making for bunkers – and thus a follow-on to my examination of the practice logics of ‘lay’ bunker hunters (e.g. Bennett 2011, 2013a). Notably, this collection is almost equally male/female split in terms of its contributors. In an article a few years ago (Bennett 2013b) I attempted to explain the gendering of bunker-hunting (with particular focus upon its taxonomic variant: bunkerology). I concluded that bunkerology’s logics of collecting and reporting expressed a totalizing, ‘masculine geography’ (Rose 1993) through the dominance of an interest in facts, technology and spaces of hermitic retreat within the observed practice. While I still stand by that broad characterization of bunkerology at least, I have found with little evidence of a gendering within academic bunker studies.

  Wilson in this volume (and Dunlop 2013) notes artists’ special ‘passports of admission’ to secret places. Academics have these too (e.g. Hugh Gunterson’s [1998] enthnographic study of a nuclear weapons factory). Beck warns of the risk of institutional capture, by those given access to the nuclear state’s live sites. So what is to be done? Can our role include the critical presencing of the (still continuing) existence and effects of the bunker and its military-industrial complex? That remains an important role, and needs to be persevered with – but there are phenomenological investigations too: the presencing of the bunker doesn’t have to be didactic, tied to one dominant discursive message.

  Hermann criticizes the dominance of an Authorised Heritage Discourse and its effect upon former Cold War sites, which aspires to create a professionally frozen heritage, which can then be passively consumed. She argues that visitor engagement (and their modes of meaning making) is more diverse than we mig
ht expect, and from her fieldwork variously reports visitors’ surprise at the size of a site (a reaction to its physicality), a general sense of the importance of conserving such exceptional spaces plus an intergenerational biographical messaging evident in younger family members being shown by elders the material traces of the anxious world they grew up in. She finds also a concern for the affective, phenomenological properties of bunker sites: ‘the smell of old things, and things that we didn’t know about makes it interesting’. And to their surprise, some visitors feel a questioning, political reaction stirred in them: a realization that only the powerful were given shelter. Our research and curation therefore needs to be able to engage this diversity of issues and responses, and Rachael Bowers and Kevin Booth show that at York Nuclear Bunker, their approach has been both considerate and sophisticated: here visitor orientation is via a short film aimed at provoking an informed, affective reaction – pitched at a level of provocation that is productive, rather than inflicting new trauma. The aim, we are told, is to trigger empathy and learning (Lafleur’s Sympathy), rather than a recreational sublime or Schadenfreude.

  Within this collection we have also heard how intimately some may interact with the bunker as an object of attention (Glass; Felmingham; Flintham; Maus; Geesink), and this does not necessarily mark a pathological withdrawal from sociality. As Daniel Miller (2009) argues, a close engagement with the object-world can help to preserve the importance of the human within it, by giving us props by which to express attachment to the world, our communities and our memories. I have argued by extension that processes of fetishization may help with the working through of trauma, and Zhang and Felmingham have each (in different ways) testified to this, while others have explored the affective, haunting and uncanny properties of a wide variety of Cold War bunkers (Wilson, Sandys, Flintham, Pérez). We have also seen the productive power of enthusiasm within a variety of forms of bunker-hunting (e.g. Geesink and Maus), and of how bunker hunters’ communal, communicative practices enhance the affective power, the material connection and the efficacy of their meaning making (here echoing Hilary Geoghegan’s [2009] studies of amateur industrial archaeologists, their object relations, motivations and practice logics). In this vein Maus questions the lay/expert divide between heritage professionals and amateur bunkerologists and geocachers, showing the important role of these enthusiasts and enthusiasm within the heritage process, and wider engagement-making with bunker spaces and their affordances. Furthermore, Bowers and Booth’s insider account of the bunker-into-heritage process shows the serendipitous and individual-led direction of the Cold War commemoration.

  The bunker is a strange form, with distinctive properties which invite examination and repurposing. Examination is both a mental and physical action. Many of the contributors speak of the embodied action of bunker exploration – and Maus finds this even alongside the taxonomic practices of his bunker hunters. Meanwhile Pérez shows the selected and personal nature of meaning making, and of the raw power of enthusiasm for particular types of place. Clambering involves intimate engagement with materiality. Furthermore, reflecting the rise of the geohumanties and new materialisms across a number of disciplines, this volume has included meditations on how bunkers (and/or their material components) can act or speak (Flintham – surfaces; Zhang/Sandys – acoustics; Geesink – stairs), and has considered the destabilization of the nature/artificial divide when applied to the adjacent geology of bunkers and caves (Pérez), and to processes of ruination.

  Meanwhile, Glass notes the ability of bunkers through the character of their abandonment to preserve and transmit cultural information – acting ‘time capsule’-like to pass this information. As Bowers and Booth evocatively put it in their chapter: ‘Original notices and documents still clung to walls and display boards. Its former occupants had left their marks in felt tip, oil spatters and coffee cup rings’. These human traces at least can speak to us directly and may say something quite shocking about our civilization, as Bowers and Booth note, reflecting upon their process of taking the York bunker back out of his semi-ruinous state and turning it into a heritage attraction, which led them to notice its re-emergence as a subterranean office block, its bunker-like otherness receding in the glare of ‘the mundane utility, order and unexpected familiarity of much of the interiors’ as they emerged from restoration. And then this becomes the revelation: that building underground offices and sticking memos on walls was our essentially bureaucratic Cold War response to the prospect of Armageddon.

  One theme that connects all of the contributions is that bunker making and re-making is unending, as abandoned Cold War facilities call out for repurposing or at least appropriation – that is the way of things and always has been, the metal scavengers attacking the domes of Albania’s mushroom-shaped bunkers just the latest instantiation of ancient tomb robbers. All of the contributions to this volume are in effect chronicles of material and/or symbolic appropriation: Virilio (seeking new aesthetic possibilities in the bunker); Wilson (experiments with old and new aesthetic tropes); Sandys (experiments with bunker atmospheres); Felmingham (the bunker as a place to working through trauma); Flintham (applying weird realism to a bunker); Pérez (ultilizing two bunkers in an autoethnographic counterpoint); Zhang (co-opting a tunnel bunker as a cultural venue); Glass (tourism and the prosaic local reuses of pillboxes); Maus (creating geocaches and new bodies of taxonomic knowledge); Hermann (making a nice day out); Bowers and Booth (restoring a bunker); Geesink (reuse of a nuclear shelter).

  FORGETTING THE BUNKER

  All of these engagements embrace a degree of flexibility – and creativity – in either the authors’ meaning making or that of the persons whom they are observing. All contributors implicitly attest to the view that making meaning for the bunker is better than not noticing it at all, and that individual meaning making is found to be meshed in complex ways with past, present and future-focused cultural forms. Perhaps we are at the brink of finding a way to denature the bunker, and perhaps it involves moving to a stance where we can embrace the bunker for reasons other than trauma-inspired fetishization and (attempted) cultural recuperation. If so, the following may be both irreverent and necessary.

  In his first approach to the Saint-Guénolé bunker Virilio found the bunker door welcoming, but by turns he was able to zoom out and appreciate the hostility (to people like him) that this place once embodied. While foregrounding the bunker’s archetypical qualities in his early phenomenological writings, by the early 1970s – when he wrote most of Bunker Archeology – Virilio actually saw the meaning of bunkers as more fluid, as something constructed situationally, not essentially. Thus bunkers move on; they have an afterlife. They are not just symbols of oppression (or resistance) nor are they just Nazi architecture, or totems of fear. The bunker is a site of continual struggle and appropriation. For John Armitage (2015) this is positive, because it denies their creator lifelong authorship; thus as an Atlantic Wall bunker is turned away from its original purpose and intended life course or legacy by being co-opted as a beach shelter. Here we encounter the notion of ‘swords into ploughshares’ – of a recuperation through putting military structures to new uses to emphasize that the war is over. But it is also indicative of the view that it is unsustainable to leave buildings or their composite materials out-of-use: the pressure to reuse, and to avoid ruination or wastage, is a very pervasive one in modern culture (Bennett 2017) and creates tension with desires to preserve the past within the built environment.

  At times it can seem that this heritage reflex spurs us to seek to save everything – but this is simply not possible, and furthermore, as Rodney Harrison (2012) has argued, it would cause the present (and the potentialities of the future) to become stymied – buried under the frozen weight of the past if we did not keep this habit in check. Harrison’s is a warning against the unselective accumulation of the past, and of our having perhaps forgotten how to forget and move-on. Bunker studies should – as a part of wider studies of the fate of
modern ruins – help us to understand sites to move on, and what the difference between ‘loss’ and ‘healthy forgetting’ actually looks like. It is notable in this regard that Geesink draws no neat divide between heritage and reuse (and feels no need to make such a separation). His enthusiasm for exploring Arnhem’s military remains informs his architectural practice, and his desire to bring forward new, commercially sustainable uses for the abandoned spaces that he finds there. This involves pragmatism and creativity. Meanwhile Bowers and Booth note that the ‘price’ for saving the York Bunker as heritage was that the ROC’s adjacent administration building had to be sacrificed to redevelopment into modern apartment blocks, as part of the commercial exchange enabling that salvation.

  Reuse of bunker sites does not have to be referential (pointing back to the Cold War) or reverential (suitably sober and guilt-ridden). Instead, for Armitage (2015, 40) ‘when we face the bunker, we need to periodize our feelings of lurking danger – to insert them into historical time and to identify the periods of relative serenity, when not only the fixed content of the military bunker but also the relation between oblique architecture and the sudden appearance of this object on the beach remain relatively tranquil’. This interpretation calls for both cultural sensitivity and an analytical edge to the study of bunker engagements. It also suggests that as time passes, it is okay to be more detached (and/or playful) in how we treat these places (Figure 14.1). In short, that the meanings of, and seriousness, of the bunker change over time.