Geographia Polonica Vol. 92 No. 1 (2019), Grubbing out the Führerbunker: Ruination, Demolition and Berlin's Difficult Subterr

Grubbing out the Führerbunker: Ruination, demolition and Berlin’s difficult subterranean heritage BENNETT, Luke Available from Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive (SHURA) at: http://shura.shu.ac.uk/24085/

This document is the author deposited version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it. Published version BENNETT, Luke (2019). Grubbing out the Führerbunker: Ruination, demolition and Berlin’s difficult subterranean heritage. Geographia Polonica, 92 (1).

Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive http://shura.shu.ac.uk Geographia Polonica 2019, Volume 92, Issue 1, pp. 71-82 https://doi.org/10.7163/GPol.0137

INSTITUTE OF GEOGRAPHY AND SPATIAL ORGANIZATION POLISH ACADEMY OF SCIENCES www.igipz.pan.pl www.geographiapolonica.pl

GRUBBING OUT THE FÜHRERBUNKER: RUINATION, DEMOLITION AND BERLIN’S DIFFICULT SUBTERRANEAN HERITAGE

Luke Bennett Department of the Natural & Built Environment Sheffield Hallam University Norfolk 306, Howard St, Sheffield, S1 1WB: United Kingdom e-mail: [email protected]

Abstract This article presents a case study examining the slow-death of the Berlin Führerbunker since 1945. Its seventy year longitudinal perspective shows how processes of ruination, demolition and urban renewal in central Berlin have been affected by materially and politically awkward relict Nazi subterranean structures. Despite now being a buried pile of rubble, the Führerbunker’s continued resonance is shown to be the product of a heterogeneous range of influences, spanning wartime concrete bunkers’ formidable material resistance, their affective affordances and evolving cultural attitudes towards ruins, demolition, memory, memorialisation, tourism and real estate in the German capital.

Key words ruin • demolition • bunkers • subterranean • Berlin • nazism • heritage • materiality

Introduction itself, a story that can provide valuable insights into the ways in which processes of ruination, On 30th April 1945 Adolf Hitler committed demolition and urban renewal are affected suicide in the Führerbunker, a reinforced con- by materially and politically awkward relict crete structure buried 8.5 metres beneath the subterranean structures. The analysis will ministerial gardens flanking the Reich Chan- be developed by weaving together glimpses cellery in central Berlin. The final days lead- of the Führerbunker in studies of Berlin’s urban ing up to Hitler’s death have been the subject memory and memorialisation (Ladd 1997; of countless books, films and ruminations and Huyssen 2003; Till 2005; Jordan 2006) with will not be restated here. Instead this article Bartolini’s (2015) recent interpretation of the will explore the far less well-known story of the immutable materialities of a fascist era under- subsequent, slow-death of the Führerbunker ground concrete bunker in Rome. 72 Luke Bennett

By following the fate of the bunker site from engaged with (as heritage or otherwise) in the 1945 through to the present day, this article present, with the ruin then treated as a ’given’, addresses calls for rich case study examina- leaving unexamined the processual questions tion of both processes of ruination and of the of ’how’ and ’why’ the ruin has arisen. This recalcitrant, affective-material political geog- dominant approach is shaped by critical herit- raphies of subterranean structures. age studies’ argument (e.g. Smith 2006; Har- First, as regards the particularities of the rison 2013) that heritage is a social construct, political geographies of the subterranean, formed and reformed in the present appro- Adey (2013: 53) has called for investigation priating the remains (material or immaterial) of the ’intense intimacies’ to be found in the of ’the past’ and interpreting and valorising underground spaces to which state power them through contemporary lenses. Thus, retreats in extremis. Klinke’s (2018) recent in this approach, the scholar’s primary con- investigation of the Cold War history of the cern is to study how the past is being used (as West German Government’s nuclear bunker heritage) in the present. Whilst this remains at Marienthal has done much to explicate the an important analytical approach, this arti- materialisation (and claustrophobia) of place, cle’s search for an account of the slow ruina- bodies and exterminatory projects entwined tion of the Führerbunker seeks to show that in the ’depths of power’ (Elden 2013) of an the fate of the Führerbunker is ultimately more underground command bunker during its than the sum of heritage debates and inter- operational life, but his study says compara- pretations alone: for the persistence of that tively little about the effect of those influ- ruin is also a function of its resistant material- ences upon the bunker’s after-life. In noting ity, its political potency and wider urban con- the limits of his own points of focus, Klinke tingencies. acknowledges and defers to the recent rise This article’s concern is therefore of a body of scholarship concerned with the to account for the evolving life-course of the interplay of matter, affect and meaning-mak- Führerbunker since 1945, accounting for its ing within abandoned, post-war military and survival (of sorts) within an urban landscape governmental Cold War bunkers (e.g. Ben- otherwise subjected to comprehensive waves nett 2017a). But abandoned Nazi-era bunkers of, near total, urban erasure and renewal. The (ruined or otherwise) have been a notably rar- analysis will show the significance of the inter- er subject of study (c.f. Virilio 1994; Bennett play of the Führerbunker’s resistant material 2011; Tzalmona 2011). This article therefore properties (i.e. the obstinacy of its subterrane- seeks to address this deficit by examining the an reinforced concrete), its ascribed affective lingering, awkward political valence of the and atmospheric properties and the shifting ruins of the most iconic Nazi era subterra- politico-cultural intensities of remembering/ nean bunker – the Führerbunker – following forgetting targeted at the bunker-ruin site its abandonment, and the various never- across the last 70 years. quite-successful attempts made after 1945 to Attitudes towards any structure (and the extinguish its feared affective-material and action, forbearance, care and/or neglect that political potency. they engender) all have an influence over Secondly, as regards contributing to the its rate of decay, and whether expressed analysis of ruination, this article’s narra- as the anxious ruin-eradicating attentiveness tive, case study-based approach responds of ’ruinphobia’ (the ability of certain ruins to Cairns & Jacobs’ (2014) call for examina- to haunt urban managers, and wider pub- tion of how buildings die. Furthermore it also lics, because of the feared disordering sym- responds to DeSilvey & Edensor’s (2013) call bolic contagion that they represent (Bennett for more studies of ruination as a process, 2017b) and for which the Führerbunker pre- for they argue that contemporary ruin stud- sents an extreme-case exemplar) or in terms ies tend to focus on how ruins come to be

Geographia Polonica 2019, 92, 1, pp. 71-82 Grubbing out the Führerbunker: Ruination, demolition and Berlin’s difficult subterranean heritage 73 of instincts towards heritage revalorisation textualising processes of demolition, ruination and potential conservation and curation. and urban renewal rather than examining the In this regard the case study will show shifting figuration of the Führerbunker from that despite its physical near-obliteration the point of view of German memory/trauma the Führerbunker remains extant – in that studies). its notoriety appears to exceed its material- Further investigation could, for instance, ity. Thus to account for the persistence of the examine whether the increasing multivalence Führerbunker the analysis must necessarily witnessed in recent re-valorisation and re- consider not just the material decay aspect engagement with the ruins of Cold War-era of ruination, but also acknowledge the paral- bunkers (see here the contributors to Ben- lel (and, at this exceptional site at least, seem- nett 2017a) might ever be replicated with ingly slower) playing out of a semantic decay, their more unequivocally ’difficult heritage’ by which the potency Führerbunker as a polit- cousins: Nazi bunkers. Such investigations ically toxic symbol and/or ’difficult heritage’ could supplement this present study by inves- (Macdonald 2009) has – if not faded away tigating how (building on and updating the – then at least modulated over time. fieldwork of Till 2005, Jordan 2006, Mac- This article’s focus is upon examining the donald 2009 and van der Hoorn 2009) the Führerbunker’s recent past, and it will largely Führerbunker is now being ’used’ by Berliners present the Führerbunker ruins as a revenant, and tourists within practices of national and wound-like agent periodically resurfacing individual identity, and establish whether it is to trouble German memory and the contem- now becoming (or indeed could ever become) porary ordering of the Berlin. No discussion a ruin-place or ruin-image to be ’safely’ expe- is attempted of the Führerbunker’s potential rienced via the ’terror as sublime’ aesthetic future rehabilitation as a more semantically accessed in contemporary ’dark tourism’ open-ended, leisure and entertainment com- practices (Lennon & Foley 2000), or further- modity. This is due to pressures of space more, and ultimately, consumed as ’simply’ in this article, and its desire to avoid dwell- another touristic stopping point on Berlin’s ing on the theme of contemporary ruin/bun- heritage trail (noting here – as a first step ker re-appropriation to an extent that might in this journey – that Berlin’s municipal author- drown-out other – less commonly heard ities permitted the installation of a tour- – lines of enquiry. ist information board at the otherwise Clearly the Führerbunker’s semantic decay nondescript site in 2006). is still far from complete – it still has reso- Having outlined the aims for, the context nance, here witness the proliferation of 3D of and the limitations in its investigation, virtual reconstructions of the Führerbunker the article will now turn to presenting its across the internet and movies. But as the case study account of the slow death of the Nazi era reaches the threshold of ’living mem- Führerbunker. ory’ a less didactic framing of the Führerbun- ker’s notoriety (and less fear of its ascribed 1987-88: demolishing infective power) might emerge in due course. the Führerbunker There is scope for further work to be done to understand the situation of the Führerbun- In 1987 Robert Conrad, a young East German ker in the present-day, and also to further photographer risked his liberty by disguising characterise the dynamics of semantic decay himself as a construction worker and taking both for modern ruins generally and spe- clandestine photographs of groundworks that cifically as regards the Führerbunker (given were preparing a characterless central Berlin that this present study has been able only waste ground site for an unremarkable seem- to work with English language sources, and ing urban regeneration: the erection of a new has approached its topic with the aim of con- Plattenbau apartment block. But what had

Geographia Polonica 2019, 92, 1, pp. 71-82 74 Luke Bennett attracted Conrad’s attention to this site was assault on the 16th April 1945, as the prel- truly exceptional for, a few months earlier ude to its ground assault upon the city, with from the vantage point of a seat on a passing over 1 million shells fired at Berlin in one day. bus, he had glimpsed over the construction This caused extensive surface damage across site’s fence a: “completely insane landscape the government district but also left the Füh- with enormous concrete ruins that had [lain] rerbunker unscathed. The bunker held firm, buried for decades protruding out of the because that was what it (and its 16 layers ground” (quoted in Gunkel 2013: n.p.). What of reinforced concrete) had been built for: Conrad had witnessed was a major project to resist attempts at its destruction. The bun- to excavate Hitler’s now-flooded bunker com- ker structure also survived the fires lit inside plex and, after dewatering it, to laboriously it by fleeing Nazis and subsequent looting grub out its obstinate concrete elements, by the Red Army units who took possession slab by slab. Formed in two levels, the works of it in in early May. Whilst above ground saw the remains of the upper Vorbunker torn the government district lay in ruins, the Füh- out, and the massive roof of the offset deeper rerbunker remained substantively intact, Führerbunker then broken up and collapsed and after German surrender on 7th May into the rooms below. The resulting ruins were it became a regular stopping point in the vic- then filled with rubble, sand and gravel and tors’ ruin-gazing tours of the conquered city, covered over to form a nondescript carpark. with Winston Churchill visiting on 1st July. But this was not the first attempt to destroy Press photographs from that summer show the Führerbunker. The destruction of the Füh- U.S. and Red Army soldiers toying with Hit- rerbunker has played out slowly over time ler’s now abandoned possessions as they lay through a mix of natural and human process- disordered within the Führerbunker’s small, es, and indeed the bunker has never quite slowly flooding, cell-like rooms. This was the fully died. In now turning to examine the ear- symbolic violence of the victor, acted out for lier demolition attempts, and their shortcom- the world to see: a more subtle version of the ings, the article will explore the intertwined widespread, and more violent, sacking of factors shaping the slow-death of this ’dif- the vanquished Nazi capital. ficult heritage’. Here, a heterogeneous mix The bunker remained open to access of factors ranging from the physical resist- until 1947 when the Red Army blew up the ance of reinforced concrete, groundwater entrance, the ventilation shafts, collapsed penetration, the evolving politics of memory some interior walls and caused the bunker’s in Berlin, changing urban aesthetics and the four metre thick roof to drop 40 cm – but the vagaries of real estate have all had their rest of the subterranean structure held firm. role to play in both explaining the survival Meanwhile, above ground, the ruins of the of the abandoned subterranean bunker for Reich Chancellery were systematically razed the first 43 years of its post-war life, and also to the ground and its marble salvaged for use its persistence as a haunting ’ruin’ site since in the construction of the Soviet war memo- 1987-88. rial in Treptower Park. Set in the context of Berlin’s post-war 1945-1986: The earlier ruinscape a more expansive destruction (of postwar attempts to defeat the type seen in 1987-88) was simply unfea- the Führerbunker sible in 1947 due to a combination of the bunker’s material resistance and pressing The first human destruction directed against distractions elsewhere. Above ground lay the Führerbunker was Allied air raids in the 75,000,000 m3 of rubble and uninhabitable closing months of the war, but these achieved ruins that needed to be cleared to make the no appreciable effect upon the underground city liveable. Observing the scale of destruc- bunker. Then came the Red Army’s artillery tion Air Marshall Sir Arthur Tedder had sug-

Geographia Polonica 2019, 92, 1, pp. 71-82 Grubbing out the Führerbunker: Ruination, demolition and Berlin’s difficult subterranean heritage 75 gested that Berlin neither could nor should As we have seen the motivation behind ever be rebuilt and that instead “the ruins the initial attempts at post-war destruction of Berlin should be preserved as a mod- was that of the symbolic violence of conquest. ern Babylon or Carthage – as a memorial As declared in the opening scenes of a July to Prussian militarism and the Nazi regime” 1945 Pathé newsreel, as the camera sweeps (quoted in Ladd 1997: 174). But in the prevail- the ruinscape: “the pompous buildings have ing humanitarian (and geo-political) context paid the price of Hitler’s crazy dream of con- this was never going to be viable and in the quering the world for Germany” (Pathé 1945). aftermath of the war attention, energy and Here, a symbolic link is created between the available resources turned to reconstruction, (human) enemy and their key buildings – sug- and to finding a non-Nazi future for Germa- gesting a need for the buildings themselves ny. Accordingly, Berlin was rebuilt, but slowly, to be punished for the crimes that they have falteringly and in a geopolitically bifurcated enabled, a phenomenon that stretches back manner (until 1989 at least) that at times fol- to Roman times, but finds its more recent lowed its own strange local logics of renewal echo in the ritual demolition of dwellings and ruination, an urban clearance which in which notorious murders have occurred. entailed the demolition of thousands of ruined Here, as Sniekers & Reijnders (2011) note, buildings and the burial of their foundations, is an attempt to detoxify a place through its cellars and shelters (and the recent past physical destruction. But as their study shows, to which they might testify) beneath millions enforcing authorities are inconsistent in how of tonnes of heaped rubble (Anderson 2017). rigorously they apply this sanction, and other At the heart of the GDR’s sense of commu- factors often intrude to distract or preclude nist futurity lay an assertion that that future punitive demolition, even of the most heinous could only be built upon foundations purged places. of Nazi contamination (Stangl 2018), for the Notably, misinformation and myth can East Germany state (est. 1949) styled itself have a role to play in fostering inaction as a bastion of antifascist resistance. The or incompletion, perhaps fuelled by cultures state’s first leader, Walter Ulbricht declared of denial. Van der Hoorn (2009) finds evi- in 1951 that “the men and women of the dence of this in Vienna, where the city’s still- new Germany are clearing away the ruins standing Nazi flak towers are widely believed of the old imperial Germany. From the ruins to be indestructible, even though most of Ber- of the old Germany a new one arises” (quoted lin’s equivalent structures were successfully in Ladd 1997: 174) and the following year blown up shortly after the war. Meanwhile the GDR made its own first attempt at (re) invisible, subterranean structures like the Füh- demolition, works that saw removal of the rerbunker invite additional confusion around Vorbunker’s roof, the infilling of its voids and whether or not they have already been elimi- the subsequent grassing over of the site. But, nated. As Till (2005) notes this proved to be despite this avowed denazification intent, the case with a Gestapo building excavated the lower level Führerbunker remained sub- by West German activists from 1987, whose stantively intact (albeit entombed by waste dig revealed the site’s foundations and cel- from the upper bunker and inaccessible lars despite confident assurances having until the excavation that Conrad witnessed been given to them by municipal officials in 1987). Ultimately, pragmatism lurked that the site’s postwar demolition had includ- beneath Ulbricht’s lofty tabula rasa aspira- ed a thorough and complete erasure of all tions, and in the end, whilst some iconic Nazi- subterranean features. era buildings in the governmental district Even in a less febrile environment than were destroyed, others were quietly stripped post-war Berlin, demolition and rubble clear- of their Nazi symbols and repurposed to suit ance is a practice equated with corner- pressing post-war needs. cutting and one characterised by limited

Geographia Polonica 2019, 92, 1, pp. 71-82 76 Luke Bennett paperwork, and even less formal discourse. experienced a further wave of intentional Construction industry publications (Pledger destruction. 1977; Byles 2005) present demolition as an But despite Conrad’s impression, the unsophisticated – almost unthought – pro- 1987-88 demolition works were not entirely cess, in which the temptation is to keep cost secret. The GDR received enquiries from and effort to a minimum. They point out that the Western media and, until overwhelmed demolition can be improvised, unpredictable, by the attention, provided journalists with expensive and/or unrewarding (in terms of sal- access to the site (Ramsey 1988). The East vage). Furthermore, the grubbing out of con- German goal of full denazification of this crete foundations is often the most expensive ruin remained evident in the response given part of demolition (Diven & Shaurette 2010), by East Berlin building chief Ehrhardt Gisske, and if the building itself lies wholly or partly who declared to Reuters: “we are blowing underground (and/or is made of reinforced everything up, every last bit will be detonated concrete) then its demolition will be a very so no keepsake remains” (Reuters 1988: n.p.). difficult and expensive job. Van der Hoorn But once again, this fantasy of obliteration (2009) notes that one prompt in the calculus did not come to pass, the bunker structure of demolition (rather than leaving a building was further disassembled by the demolition in ruin) will be whether there is a use for the works, but these works left many very large materials which the structure is made of. But 'bits' of the bunker in existence, buried where Berlin was already very well served by sup- they fell within the bunker’s original structural plies of rubble, and the Führerbunker held footprint. Thus the Führerbunker had suffered no marble or other valuable matter to incen- substantial disordering through the 1987-88 tivise its disassembly. works, but it remained extant as an invisible Reuse of the building or the site upon subterranean ruin-pile. which it sits is another spur to its eradica- Then suddenly, and most unexpectedly, tion, but following the 1952 demolition the Berlin Wall fell and in the early 1990s, attempt, the Führerbunker thereafter found and post-reunification urban renewal saw itself in a deadly backwater, a space in which this backwater zone transformed into new development was increasingly unlikely Europe’s largest building site. And in that new to prompt another attempt at erasure of the era, and amidst changed attitudes to how subterranean ruins, no matter how loathed to deal with the Nazi past, for a time the they might be. The deadly backwater was the Führerbunker hovered close to – but never death strip created in service of the Berlin quite attained – resurrection as a monument Wall. Here, from 1961 until 1989 the bur- -of-sorts. ied remains of the Führerbunker lay within an area cleared by the GDR and thereafter Post 1989: the Führerbunker populated only by rabbits, ditches, paths, as contaminant, rubble walls, security lights, barbed wire, electric and/or countermonument fences, guard towers, spring guns, mine fields and tank traps. This was an intentional waste- Developments in German memorial culture land in the centre of the city, caused by two since the 1970s increased the prospects for countries turning away from each other, the remains (real or imagined) of the Füh- a deadly desolation of 17 acres stretching rerbunker finding a new use, as a negative from the Brandenburg Gate to Potzdamer monument (a place of moral warning: a Mah- Platz. Here time stood still for the Führerbun- nmal), a place in which the history of the site ker until in 1987 the exigencies of the GDR’s and the affective-material qualities of con- apartment building campaign brought devel- fined, subterranean structures could be put opment to the fringe of the death strip, and to work. The 1970s saw the emergence as Conrad witnessed, the Führerbunker then of a more pluralist, bottom-up approach

Geographia Polonica 2019, 92, 1, pp. 71-82 Grubbing out the Führerbunker: Ruination, demolition and Berlin’s difficult subterranean heritage 77 to public- and urban- memory, first in West ever did not regard the ferro-concrete of its Berlin and then after 1989 in the East. In the bunkers as the stuff of posterity, it was the 1970s West Germany turned to confront the grand, stone fronted public buildings that Nazi past that it had seemingly so quickly were to endure, not the form-follows-function forgotten in the aftermath of the war, initially structures of its military fortifications. And with a focus upon memorialising victims (prin- yet – as the case of the Führerbunker shows cipally, but not exclusively, the Holocaust) and – it is actually the bomb proof bunkers that thereafter with a desire to memorialise sites have survived. In the face of this hidden sur- of perpetrators – as a form of confrontation: vival, the managers of Berlin’s urban realm via “brazen, painfully self-conscious memo- worry that that these lurking subterranean rial spaces conceived to challenge the very remains might leech Nazism, and its relat- premises of their being”(Young 1993: 27). ed dark affects, into contemporary Berlin In considering how the buried rubble-ruins if given any attention. of the Führerbunker came to be considered A recent ’materialist’ turn in cultural the- as a potential part of the burgeoning memo- ory has seen the ascription of an affective rial culture of the ’new Berlin’ we must first vibrancy (and agency of sorts) to customar- note the cultural awkwardness of the site and ily ’dumb brute’ matter. Bartolini (2015) has its material remains within German culture recently considered the limits of this ascribed and polity, as an extreme case of ’ruinpho- potency in her analysis of the staging of an bia’ (Bennett 2017b). Time and again officials artist installation within an abandoned fas- have worried that any official signification cist era underground bunker in Rome. In Bar- of (or access to) these ’ruins’ might encourage tolini’s analysis the artists’ installation had Neo-Nazis to treat the site and its remains failed to activate the bunker-space, such as a shrine to Hitler. The site was therefore that it could operate productively upon its seen as afflicted by a moral contamination visitors as a confrontation. Bartolini argued, which must be contained lest that contagion persuasively, that the building materials that otherwise escape, and that that contamina- compose the bunker are insufficient of them- tion was heightened by the connotations selves to transmit a historical sense of the of ’bunker’ as a place-form. bunker as a former geo-political nodal point. Bunkers have been figured by Beck (2011) As she put it, “a concrete container located as ambiguous structures, which contempo- underground is not equivalent to identifying rary culture has struggled to assimilate, due the structure as ’Mussolini’s bunker’” (2015: to their embodiment of violence and their 207). ambiguous womb/tomb dichotomy. They Thus in Bartolini’s view a bunker (or its also embody culturally encoded ’underworld’ remains) cannot be left to simply ’speak for myths and present certain temporally disrup- itself’, as to be more than a concrete contain- tive ’time capsule’. For Virilio (1994) bunkers er, a bunker needs to be culturally activated have atavistic connotations, working upon by curators and visitors, something which our perception in primal ways and psychoan- might have been achieved in the Rome bun- alyst Carl Jung specifically regarded the Füh- ker if the visitors to it could have been more rerbunker as “a dark reflection of a universal actively engaged in the process of explora- symbol in the collective consciousness of our tion and memory-making there (rather than culture” (quoted in O’Donnell 1979: xi). just being shown there the artists’ work and This anxiety about the Führerbunker is fur- their own interpretation of the place and ther amplified by its convergence with the its traces of fascism and war). This ’active Nazi’s own belief in the power of the ruinous museum’ philosophy reflects the founding remains to transmit the Third Reich’s great- principles of the activists who established ness for 1,000 years. Hitler’s architect, and the Topography of Terror memorial site, the theorist of ’ruin value’, Albert Speer how- close to the Führerbunker (but in West Berlin)

Geographia Polonica 2019, 92, 1, pp. 71-82 78 Luke Bennett in 1987. At the time that Conrad was watch- Libeskind’s design for his Jewish Museum ing the grubbing out of the Führerbunker (opened in Berlin in 2001). in order to bury it, on the other side of the It is not known whether the 1987-88 demo- Berlin Wall these activist were leading pub- lition works left any voids within the subter- lic excavations of the foundations and cel- ranean rubble-pile of the Führerbunker, but lars of the former Gestapo HQ. The activ- given its potent symbolic and phenomeno- ists established a processional curation logical properties, and in the wake of these of the site which incorporated a descent into trends in Berlin’s urban aesthetics and memo- the excavated cellars as a destination for con- rial culture, it is perhaps not surprising that frontation with Germany’s Nazi past. At this the 1990s saw intermittent awkward con- site the aim – anchored in the processual templation of the memorial potential of the materiality of excavation – was to keep a raw Führerbunker’s imagined void spaces, most wound within the heart of Berlin. Gentrifica- notably that in 1994 Harald Szeemann’s tion of the surrounding area following reuni- recommendation that the Führerbunker site fication has caused that site to lose some be incorporated into the proposed Memorial of its rawness, but excavation and confron- to the Murdered Jews of Europe formed part tation co-opting the visceral, affective quali- of the instructions issued to competitors in the ties of exposed subterranean spaces remains first design contest for that memorial. As Till key to the site’s rationale and the idea that (2005) reports, Szeemann envisaged a visi- materiality plus memory can have powerful tor accessing, confronting and processionally “pedagogic power” (Jordan 2006: 44). overcoming the Führerbunker. Visitors would Young (1993) has noted the rise of coun- enter and walk through “an underground termonuments – sites that seek like Mahn- landscape of memory” (2005: 176) – con- mal to unsettle but which also aim to avoid fronting the past as they moved between dif- redemption or semantic closure. This trend ferent rooms (extant or reconstructed) along is apparently echoed in the evolution of Ber- a path of redemption. The Szeemann design lin’s urban aesthetics, wherein Göbel (2015) rationale stated: “buried deep in the earth and Sandler (2016) have pointed to an were bunkers in which the perpetrators hid ingrained resistance towards cleansing in the final hour before the destruction they or finishing buildings in the city, as though had wreaked on others struck back at them a provocative roughness contributes to their and in which Hitler’s mania ended in suicide. ability to resist the neat closure or resolution Reference should be made to this combina- of history. In particular, Göbel has pointed tion of hubris, destruction and self-destruc- to the significance of ruin atmospheres within tion” (quoted in Till 2005: 176). Additionally, this process of intentionally uncomforted Szeemann said the memorial should “violate dwelling. Meanwhile, the unhomely (unhe- the earth” and “sink into it like memory”. imlicht – uncanny) atmospheric potentiality However, there was considerable opposition of abandoned bunkers has been exploited to the idea of connecting the memorial to the by sound and installation artists like Sandys site of the Führerbunker, both from Jewish (2017), using the particular properties of their groups and local government – who objected confined spaces through which to provoke to any memorialisation or heritage designa- unsettling, embodied affects in their visitors tion on the basis that the Führerbunker lay in order to re-animate an abandoned subter- partly beneath the apartment buildings and ranean bunkers’ “intimate intensities” (Adey partly because the “bunkers are neither archi- 2013: 53), through intentional aesthetic, tecturally nor materially in any way percepti- atmospheric design. In Berlin these trends ble” (quoted in Jordan 2006: 122). Instead the converge in the motif of viewable but inacces- Jewish memorial (now to be designed by Peter sible confined grey void spaces, which were Eisenman’s following a fresh design competi- incorporated to arresting effect in Daniel tion in 1998) would be built elsewhere upon

Geographia Polonica 2019, 92, 1, pp. 71-82 Grubbing out the Führerbunker: Ruination, demolition and Berlin’s difficult subterranean heritage 79 the former death strip. But even the new site kitschy wall paintings showing SS soldiers was not free of Nazi moral contamination, fighting to protect women and Germany. This as it was close to the former site of Joseph discovery caused alarm and immediate calls Goebbels' town house, and even closer to its for the bunker’s destruction. It was quickly underground bunker. Once again there was resealed, although in 1992 Alfred Kernd’l, suggestion that there might be confronta- head of the municipal archaeology office was tional value in incorporating a Nazi bunker allowed to reopen and inventory it. Kernd’l’s in some way into the memorial, but this sug- subsequent call for preservation of this place gestion was also rejected and the Goebbels’ met fierce opposition – including from some bunker remained sealed. The monument groups otherwise in favour of confronting the does, however, feature a 800 m2 bunker-like past – amidst fear of creating a Neo-Nazi subterranean information centre beneath its shrine. Kernd’l countered that destruction field of 2,700 concrete stelae. of this bunker would signal significance (and The discovery of the Goebbels bunker fear of potency) to the Neo-Nazis, by ascrib- shows the former death strip as revenant ing a latent power to the remains that they ground, where the past unexpectedly surfac- did not deserve. Instead, for Kernd’l the bun- es to interfere with the plans of the present. ker exposed the banality of evil – the implica- As Ladd notes: “planners and developers tion of low ranks and the arrogance and sen- at work in the new Berlin come to grief again timentality at the heart of the Nazi regime. and again when they try to treat the city’s In the end the Berlin Senate decided against streets and buildings and lots as mere real opening the bunker to the public. It suggest- estate” (1997: 3). Coming to terms with the ed that the wall paintings could be moved inherited realities of the ground conditions to the German Historical Museum – but they of any ’brownfield’ site is a complex process wanted nothing to do with them. Thereafter of familiarisation (Bennett & Crawley Jack- the bunker was sealed up again. It, like many son 2017) and Moshenska (2010) has shown of the other bunkers, now lies buried beneath that when the relics of conflict are encoun- the government buildings constructed upon tered during development works, this causes the death strip towards the end of the 1990s a jarring effect in which the past suddenly (ownership of the strip having been parcelled intrudes, and whether in the form of unex- out to the German federal states). ploded bombs, the remains of combatants A particular problem with the drivers’ or the subterranean structures that prolifer- bunker was that it projected a warlike, defi- ate in wartime and for which accurate plans ant Nazism – something quite different from showing location and extent do not always the Hitlers’-last-days abjection commonly exist. For Moshenska this jarring is, itself, ascribed to the Führerbunker. Like tombs, a form of countermonumentality. bunkers pose difficulties and opportunities Goebbels’ bunker was not the only subter- in their ease at acting like a self-archiving ranean structure to unexpectedly surface dur- time-capsule. They work well to protect their ing redevelopment of the death strip. In the contents, and the times and ideas that they summer of 1990, as part of preparation for embody without the need for human involve- a rock concert to celebrate the fall of the Wall, ment. Therefore, discovery of them throws a security sweep found the roof of a bunker, one world into another, with an authentic- one of an estimated 20 or so bunkers built ity that may be too much to bear, because and interconnected in the vicinity of the Füh- the story of Berlin’s Nazi underground is not rerbunker. The bunker was found to be a facil- just one of impotence, downfall, and civilian ity for Hitler’s SS guards and drivers’ unit. shelter (in an improvised subterranean world On opening it the bunker was revealed to be of cellar dwelling), it was also stories of war- a Nazi time-capsule: untouched since 1945, directing and extermination-coordination replete with weapons, silverware and eight proudly acted out below ground.

Geographia Polonica 2019, 92, 1, pp. 71-82 80 Luke Bennett

Oddly, some Nazi bunkers for which However, the experience in central Berlin does the main narratives are war-directing and throw up a challenge to Bartolini’s suggestion extermination-coordination have, it seems, that a sealed off subterranean bunker is not been readily converted into post-war military a ’palimpsest’ (Huyssen 2003), because “the use and/or museums, like the Wolf’s Lair, and bunker is not a trace or a shadow as it is pre- command bunkers at Zossen, Marienthal, and sent and also part of the foundation of an office along the Atlantic Wall. But seemingly this building, and it does not haunt the landscape museumification would be too much to bear since, as a shelter, it was never meant to be in the still charged atmosphere of central Ber- seen in the first place.” (2015: 206). This state- lin. As Jordan notes it appears that most of the ment seems too fixated on the ocular, because parties involved in decision making about the visibility of the bunker is not the only regis- the central Berlin bunkers still share a belief ter by which it persists or acts upon the surface in “the power of authentic location and the (or the present). Within central Berlin the ’invis- moral content of this physical place, imply- ible’ ruins of Nazi bunkers resonate as symbols ing a belief in a kind of material transmission which appear too authentic to encounter, even of evil” (2006: 188). During the debate about within the reflexive, confrontational formulae the drivers’ bunkers activists from the Topog- of countermonumentality. raphy of Terror suggested that access could Bartolini also appears to equate existence be arranged by tours led by guides trained with human accessibility. The Führerbunker in anti-fascist education in order to ensure has been crushed and compacted by succes- that the fine line between a beneficial and sive demolition projects. There may be isolat- confrontational exposure to the Nazi past ed voids (although they are probably flooded did not tip over into an advert for Nazism. if they exist). There may be traces of the struc- The bunker thus presented as a complex and ture that could be perceived by excavation, potent moral object, with a pedagogic power ground penetrating radar or endoscopy, but that could contaminate contemporary poli- what would be viewed would be very much ties (and sensibilities) if not carefully curated a non-human terrain, no human could dwell by inoculated specialists. there. However, a ruin is not just matter, it is a place at which matter has been signified Conclusion: the Führerbunker in a particular way. And for the Führerbunker as material and immaterial ruin the narrative that feeds that enduring signification remains strong. Ever since a young As Jordan (2006) has noted, not all seem- British army intelligence officer, Trevor-Roper ingly strong candidates for memorialisa- (1995) published the results of his investigation become memorials. These early 1990s tion into Hitler’s last days in 1947, the Füh- encounters with the Chancellery’s satellite rerbunker has resonated through Anglo- bunkers emphasised to all concerned that American culture, feeding waves of cultural some things may still be too difficult to sur- production and dark tourism alike. As van face. And indeed, that even the act of destruc- der Hoorn (2009) notes, some undesired tion would involve a temporary surfacing (as places are so undesired that they are needed Conrad witnessed in 1987-88) that could risk – because they provide part of our symbolic a release of moral contamination. Unsurpris- universe (and whether moral, aesthetic or oth- ingly therefore the older West German post- erwise). Thus, ruins of an extremely destroyed war reflex of ’letting the grass grow’ over condition can still signify even if invisible and difficult heritage resurfaced. intentionally ignored by officialdom, snubbed It is unfair to use the complex moral charge by a strategy of “profanation” (Macdonald of the Führerbunker and its satellites to direct- 2009: 88) that seeks to symbolically deny ly challenge Bartolini’s analysis of her, far significance to the site through the mundan- less morally loaded, fascist bunker in Rome. ity of its overlying carparks, roadways and

Geographia Polonica 2019, 92, 1, pp. 71-82 Grubbing out the Führerbunker: Ruination, demolition and Berlin’s difficult subterranean heritage 81 municipal buildings. Furthermore, monumen- “The ground is uneven, the grass shabby, talisation does not just exist in the physical there are a few stones littered around, and world – the Führerbunker has a potent sym- you can pick up one and ask whether it was bolic existence via myriad maps, models and once part of the great ensemble of buildings photographs (Bennett 2011). Suppression meant to protect the Führer. The imagina- of its physical site may be a necessary tactic tion runs wild with speculation, the absence for ensuring that an overdose of pedagogic of evidence invites this. Where underground power does not occur, but blanking the physi- are the cells, which contained communication cal presence of the (uninhabitable) remains switchboards, generators, ventilators, bed- of the Führerbunker is not the same thing rooms, water tanks and wine cellars? I half as the eradication of representations of the imagine a whole crew of Nazis, underground, Führerbunker, and in the absence of directed still waiting, for the right moment to emerge, narratives more speculative, mythic read- like a scene from a Kusturica film. There ings of the bland site will continue to cir- is a silence about this place that provokes fan- culate, and whether for good or ill, as one tasy. Meanwhile, there is no official impetus blogger reflects at the site (Pearson 2011): to excavate, or even to memorialise further.”

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