The Bunker and the Camp: Inside West Germany's Nuclear Tomb

Abstract

Recent research has located the camp as the paradigmatic space that emerges when geopolitics and biopolitics intersect. In doing so, it has neglected another space that is indispensable for an understanding of the nexus of these two modalities of power: the nuclear bunker. This paper explores the West German government's now abandoned nuclear bunker in the Ahr valley. Constructed on the site of a subterranean World War 2 concentration camp, the bunker hosted a number of NATO exercises, which simulated nuclear war on German soil. Through an analysis of the site's military-strategic context and its technical and security features, the paper relates it to its predecessorthe camp-and uncovers a number of spatial overlaps and inversions between the two. Whilst similarly situated within a context of legal exceptionality, logistics, and total war, the concentrated and confined living space of the nuclear bunker turned the camp's logic of extermination inside out. The nuclear bunker was a concrete crypt in which sovereign power and total war sought to find eternal peace.

Beyond the Agamben paradigm: The spatial logics of exceptionalism

“…More than the mere application of the state of exception or homo sacer to the surface of things, political geographers attempting to understand and articulate the world through the frame of Agamben’s theoretical cosmos sort-out and separate phenomena by implementing just such a dictate of paradigmatic exceptionalism. For instance, within the pages of this journal, Klinke (2015) has extended Agamben’s thesis to the transformation of a National Socialist labor camp and weapons manufacturing site to a Cold War nuclear bunker. In doing so, he is able to establish how peoples and populations in both instances were rendered as homines sacri , expendable by and to the sovereign state.…”

“…Working in and around the field of political geography, homo sacer , the camp, and the state of exception have been extracted from Agamben’s broader philosophical project and applied to considerations of colonial military interventions (Enns, 2004; Fluri, 2009; Gregory, 2004, 2006; Tagma, 2009) and regimes of surveillance, security, and detention (Edkins, 2008; Minca, 2006, 2015a; Morin, 2013). Agamben’s central characters have likewise been employed to understand various manifestations of biopower throughout the 20th and 21st centuries (Debrix, 2015; Ek, 2006; Giaccaria and Minca, 2011; Klinke, 2015; Muller, 2008; Papastergiadis, 2006; Ramadan, 2012; Springer, 2013).…”

Towards nuclear geography: Zones, bodies, and communities

“…Beyond these disaster geographies, nuclear bunkers are other notable zones of nuclear exceptionality. They are curious spaces that both preempt and embody risk (Klinke, ). Unlike exclusion zones, which are designated spaces of pollution, nuclear bunkers are designed to exclude radiation and protect its inhabitants.…”

An Arendtian geopolitics: Action, power and the deferral of work

“…Smith and Pain, 2016) widely acknowledge that geopolitics is neither the preserve of state power nor something impinging only on the lives of distant and unseen others in the name of sovereign wills. It is not simply death through a lens, machinic velocities, drones (Gregory, 2011; Shaw and Akhter, 2012; Williams, 2011), nukes (MacDonald, 2006) and bunkers (Klinke, 2015). Equally, those labelled as terrorists can ‘do’ geopolitics or anti-geopolitics as the discursive-material practices which challenge ‘the hegemony of the state and its elites by those who are dominated by it’ (Koopman, 2011: 275).…”