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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Serie: RGS-IBG Book Series
- Sprache: Englisch
Cryptic Concrete explores bunkered sites in Cold War Germany in order to understand the inner workings of the Cold War state.
- A scholarly work that suggests a reassessment of the history of geo- and bio-politics
- Attempts to understand the material architecture that was designed to protect and take life in nuclear war
- Zooms in on two types of structures - the nuclear bunker and the atomic missile silo
- Analyzes a broad range of sources through the lens of critical theory and argues for an appreciation of the two subterranean structures’ complementary nature
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Series Editor’s Preface
Preface
Chapter One: Of Blood and Soil
The Death of German Geopolitics
West Germany and the Bomb
Towards a Cold War Biopolitics
The Bunker and the Camp
Approach and Structure
Chapter Two:
Lebensraum
and Its Underside
In Defence of the Earth
The Rise of German Geopolitics
Life and Death in the German Geopolitical Tradition
From Abstraction to Materialisation
Complementary Archetypes
Autoimmunity
Chapter Three: Return to the Soil
Jumping the Big Pond
The Rebirth of German Geopolitics
The Contours of a New German Geopolitics
Return to the Soil
Beyond the Taboo
Chapter Four: Nuclear Living Space
Überlebensraum
Civil Defence and the Return of the Bunker
From Camp to Bunker
Overlaps and Inversions
Opening
Chapter Five: Spaces of Extermination
Places of Forgetting
Sharing the Bomb
The Architecture of Missile Storage
Raum Ohne Volk
Razor Wire and its Discontents
Chapter Six: Enter the Void
Nuclear Play
Fallex 66
A War Game and Its Reception
Subterranean Play
Self‐Annihilation
The Death Drive of German Geopolitics
Chapter Seven: Conclusion
The Nuclear Present
Ruin Value
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 01
Figure 1.1 Konrad Adenauer on a visit to the United States (1961).
Figure 1.2 Conservative election poster: ‘
No – therefore CDU
’ (1949).
Figure 1.3 Tactical nuclear weapons paraded on the Nürburgring (1969).
Chapter 02
Figure 2.1 Auschwitz‐Birkenau (1977).
Figure 2.2 Civilian bunker, Germany (around 1943).
Chapter 03
Figure 3.1 Representation of sea‐launched nuclear war.
Figure 3.2 Front cover of 1957 book that was endorsed by senior military figures.
Figure 3.3 Map revealing West Germany’s vulnerability to light bombers and long‐range weapons.
Figure 3.4 Blueprint depicting nuclear bunker.
Chapter 04
Figure 4.1 Effects of nuclear war on German agriculture.
Figure 4.2 Underground station functioning as a bunker.
Figure 4.3 Plan of a bunkered house in two states: before and after the blast wave.
Figure 4.4 The effects of radiation on concrete, brick and earth.
Figure 4.5 Guidelines for soldiers in nuclear war.
Figure 4.6 Blast door.
Figure 4.7 Decontamination showers at Marienthal.
Chapter 05
Figure 5.1 Watchtower at Special Ammunition Site Alten‐Buseck 2015.
Figure 5.2 Warhead storage bunker at Special Ammunition Site Alten‐Buseck 2015.
Figure 5.3 NATO atomic missiles storage (1992).
Figure 5.4 Guards at Camp Bellersdorf (early 1980s).
Chapter 06
Figure 6.1 Cartoon from the East German press (Tribüne 1967).
Chapter 07
Figure 7.1 Abandoned missile camp in Bellersdorf (Hesse) 2015.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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RGS-IBG Book Series
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Cryptic Concrete
A Subterranean Journey Into Cold War Germany
Ian Klinke
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Klinke, Ian, author.Title: Cryptic concrete : a subterranean journey into Cold War Germany / by Ian Klinke.Other titles: Subterranean journey into Cold War GermanyDescription: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons Ltd., [2018] | Series: RGS‐IBG book series | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2017051957 (print) | LCCN 2018004340 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119261131 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119261124 (epub) | ISBN 9781119261032 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119261117 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Nuclear weapons–Government policy–Germany (West) | Geopolitics–Germany–History–20th century. | Biopolitics–Germany–History–20th century. | Bunkers (Fortification)–Germany (West) | Guided missile bases–Germany (West) | Civil defense–Germany (West–History. | Military maneuvers–Germany (West) | Nuclear warfare–Government policy–Germany (West) | Landscapes–Germany (West) | Cold War.Classification: LCC U264.5.G3 (ebook) | LCC U264.5.G3 K55 2018 (print) | DDC 355.02/17094309045–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051957
Cover Design: WileyCover Image: Image of NATO nuclear weapons storage site, West Germany © Ian Klinke
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Preface
It must have been in 1990 when I found out that the hill behind my friend’s sandpit was hollow, perhaps so hollow that it could swallow an entire army. What lay beneath the vineyards was a secret, but it was one that was passed on from child to child. The story that circulated amongst us was one of a subterranean city with streets and lanterns, buses and cars, bakeries and sweet shops, as well as tanks, missiles and soldiers. My friend and I gazed with enthralment at the barbed wire, the guards and the watchtowers, behind which we correctly suspected lay the entrance to this secret underworld. It made me feel uncomfortable – and yet my imagination was drawn to it. As we dug holes deep into the sandpit for our plastic soldiers, missiles and tanks, we lost ourselves in geopolitical fantasy. We were child strategists, subterranean generals, standing tall at the end of history.
Of course, the meaning of the events that brought an end to the Cold War had not been lost on us. The political excitement was palpable, the feeling of cultural superiority overpowering – even for an eight‐year‐old. Soon, our television set would show a city plunged into an extravagant display of green fireworks. This city was Bagdad and the green light was the flickering of the Iraqi anti‐aircraft guns in their attempt to resist the world’s sole remaining superpower. It was a truly captivating display of power – though it was ultimately as intangible as the nuclear explosion I had once seen in an American film. I found it difficult to relate to on a personal level. The West German government’s nuclear bunker behind my friend’s house, however, was something much more concrete and tangible. The bunker felt so real, even though it was so well concealed. It seemed to be mine, even though it was never made for mere mortals like me. For me, this concrete survival shell was a forbidden land of plenty and a place of salvation, a place where my fantasies were safe. This secret and sacred space was uncanny – unheimlich – in the Freudian sense of something that is both alien and familiar, repulsive and attractive.
The social theorist Paul Virilio has argued that bunkers have functioned as underground places of security, hidden and forbidden places, ‘as in the English word, cryptic’ (Virilio, in Armitage 2009: 23). Reflecting on German air‐shelters that were converted into churches, he has suggested that ‘these places of shelter from danger, and places of worship, [] are also places of salvation’ (ibid.). As in the stone chambers beneath Christian churches, death has a haunting presence in the nuclear bunker. The bunker is an ambivalent space, both ‘shelter’ and ‘grave’ (Bennett 2011a: 156), ‘womb’ and ‘tomb’ (Beck 2011: 82). Part of this ambivalence may be inherent in the very material of which most bunkers are made. As Adrian Forty (2012: 169) puts it:
Concrete is a base material. Its dense mass lends it to the resistance of forces, whether natural or man‐made. Good for foundations, sea defences, fortifications, nuclear shields, anywhere that monolithic inertness is called for, this quality puts it low down in the hierarchy of materials. At the same time, though, concrete has from its earliest days appealed to church builders.
Forty reminds us that despite its ability to withstand tremendous forces, concrete holds an ambiguous position between the modern and traditional, cultural and natural. Notwithstanding its success in the twentieth century, concrete is neither a modern creation (for its use by humans dates back thousands of years) nor indeed a purely cultural phenomenon (it does exist in natural form despite being rare as such). Concrete, in other words, is difficult to categorise – it almost wants to be interpreted.
Twenty‐five years later, I understand why the bunker and its surroundings had exerted such a strong attraction on me, for the infantile war game that I had once played behind my friend’s house had a very particular personal significance. From an early age I had been forbidden to play with toy soldiers and other such ‘symbols of militarism’. Mine was a life without the symbols of boyish masculinity. In my school friend’s house, right next to the government’s nuclear bunker, however, the rules were different and I was able to indulge in war games of all sorts, from the positioning of plastic tanks in a sandpit to more elaborate strategy games. I knew I had to remain silent about this forbidden form of enjoyment when I returned home – but this did not in any way compromise my guilty pleasure. Only decades later, when I started to develop an academic interest in the site that lay behind the sandpit, did I find out that there had been similar subterranean and forbidden games going on underneath our playground. For every two years, the West German state would lock up its political and military elites underground so that they could play the apocalypse. I now understand that these games were in fact driven by an obsessive politics of earth and life.
Geopolitics, the politics of earth, was first developed at the turn of the twentieth century as a geographical theory about state behaviour. It posited that states needed to conquer and dominate political space if they wanted to survive in a competitive international environment. In Germany, this geographical discourse was crucial in legitimating the Third Reich’s invasion of the Soviet Union and the conquest of living space in Eastern Europe. Geopolitics was always intertwined with biopolitics (the politics of life), the belief that the state should be understood as an organism that struggles for survival. The Third Reich’s extermination of unwanted populations became possible only by branding some groups as cancerous cells within this organism. These two forms of power were linked in many ways, but most crucially in the fantasy of conquering Lebensraum (living space) in Eastern Europe. This fantasy, or so I argue in this book, did not simply vanish with the demise of the Third Reich but took on a new form. In order to understand this fully, we need to grapple not just with the strategic discourses of the Cold War but with the violent architecture of the atomic age itself.
This book then prompts us to reassess the history of geo‐ and biopolitics by exposing the ways in which the Cold War reproduced and inverted the spaces of survival and extermination that had emerged in and through World War II. In an attempt to understand the material architecture that was designed to protect and take life in nuclear war, I explore two types of structure that stood at the vanishing point of geo‐ and biopolitics – the nuclear bunker and the atomic missile site. Analysing a broad range of archival sources through the lens of critical theory, I argue for an appreciation of the two subterranean structures’ complementary nature. Following Eyal Weizman, I approach architecture as solidified political forces, or ‘politics in matter’, matter that we can study through its form and ornamentation, as well as the organisation and infrastructure that enables and sustains it (Weizman 2007: 5–7). The architects of these violent geographies are thus the military strategists, engineers, civil defence planners and politicians of the Cold War state. But unlike Weizman (2002: 2), who sees geopolitics as a ‘flat discourse’ which fails to comprehend the three‐dimensionality of modern warfare, I argue that these male strategists, and they are almost exclusively men, were already animated by the idea that Cold War geopolitics had to be fought in three‐dimensional space, specifically, of course, in subterranea.
By examining the politics of nuclear weapons in West Germany in both an intellectual and an architectural register, Cryptic Concrete thus makes a tentative step in the direction of a biopolitics of the Cold War, an issue that was recently proposed by Collier and Lakoff (2015; see also Klinke 2015). The book also seeks to contribute to recent and ongoing debates on the materiality of geopolitics by interweaving the analysis of material forms with an examination of geo‐ and biopolitical thought, revealing how military architecture remained in dialogue with these ideas even after they had been proclaimed dead.
The Federal Republic of Germany is an excellent starting point for any such investigation because of the country’s role as a designated battlefield in the case of a war with the Warsaw Pact. After joining NATO in 1955, Bonn participated in and drove the alliance towards a policy of hard‐line nuclear deterrence. This policy and the subsequent nuclearisation of West German territory meant that the country permanently played with the idea of national suicide in ways that invoked in unambiguous terms the final days of the Third Reich. Indeed, the West German examples can be used to illustrate some of the historical continuities between the fascist and the Cold War state, not least because there was a vast overlap of personnel, ideology and military technology before and after 1945. By looking at Germany, the book attempts to turn academic debates on military landscapes away from their Anglo‐American bias to reveal the shared origins of fascist and Cold War geopolitics. Through tracing the emergence of the Cold War, I hope we can learn to appreciate that ‘the detonation of the first atomic bomb’ did perhaps not mark ‘the end of one kind of time, and the apotheosis of another’ (Masco 2006: 1). Rather than ‘explod[ing] experiences of time [and] undermining the logics of the nation‐state’ (ibid.: 12), the West German Cold War state found new ways of articulating a very familiar biopolitical modernity in which the state fostered some forms of life and abandoned others, valorising some deaths and failing to remember others. In West Germany, the technological move from Dresden to Hiroshima, or what Peter Sloterdijk (2009: 57) calls the shift from thermoterrorism to radioterrorism, was in fact framed through and organised around similar leitmotifs as Nazi geo‐ and biopolitics, including the latter’s obsession with questions of survival and extermination.
Despite its ambition of contributing to theorisations of both geo‐ and biopolitics, this is also of course a book about Germany. Cryptic Concrete is intended for readers who want to understand the history and politics of the West German state, which remains of course the legal basis for a reunified Germany. This book is not, however, in any way meant to form a comprehensive study of German Cold War history, nor does it claim to have unearthed any particular sites that were previously unknown to the public. Instead, it sets out to re‐read Germany’s nuclear landscapes through critical theories of geo‐ and biopolitics. In doing so, the book is foremost a geographical one that tries to understand how ideas about space, power and survival, developed by the likes of Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer in the late nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century, managed to survive the demise of National Socialism. It tells the story of how the proto‐fascist idea of the state as an organism produced particular architectural forms, not just in the Third Reich but also during the Cold War.
The starting point and underlying assumption of this book is that power operates in material as much as ideational ways. Rather than abandoning the study of geopolitical traditions alongside the overly textual focus that marked political geography during the 1990s, Cryptic Concrete tries to develop more imaginative ways of thinking with and against the geopolitical tradition. In doing so, it starts from the premise that whilst the study of geopolitical texts has a tendency to be merely ‘parasitic’ upon a particular form of writing (Ó Tuathail 1996: 53), more recent scholarship, which has tried to rethink geopolitics along ‘more‐than‐human’ lines, often loses sight of its object of study. Whilst the former runs into the danger of being only concerned with the ‘mummified’ remains of what was once an influential mode of thought (Ó Tuathail & Dalby 1998: 2), the latter either treats geopolitics as a mere synonym for global politics or develops a conception of geopolitics that is strangely detached from any previous understandings of the term. Instead, this book tries to fuse the study of geopolitical traditions with the study of the ways in which geopolitics is forged through the built environment and imprinted onto the human body. It is thus interested in the places in which geopolitical subjects are formed.
In doing so, a few words of caution are imperative. Whilst the book does feature a detailed discussion of geopolitical thinkers, I neither wish to reduce the history of geopolitics to the ideas of important men (for this critique, see Sharp 2000a: 363) nor do I intend to overstate their direct influence on political events. Rather, I would like to argue that we can find an obsession with spaces of national survival and extinction – which was first powerfully articulated through German geopolitics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – in the military landscapes of the Cold War. Geo‐ and biopolitics, in other words, managed to survive despite having been proclaimed dead, a resilience I have described elsewhere as ‘undead’ (Klinke 2011: 719; see also MacDonald in Jones & Sage 2010). In this way, then, the book is meant as a provocation to reconsider the politics of nuclear war through notions of geo‐ and biopolitics. This, I feel, is necessary because the Cold War is often regarded today as a historical absurdity with little relevance for the contemporary world. It is especially phenomena such as bunker tourism that often deny ‘the origins of these sites in periods of deep ideological violence, ruination and trauma’ (Graham 2016: 359). In her history of the US intercontinental missile ‘Minuteman’, Gretchen Heefner remarks:
We are told that nuclear deterrence is no longer our bulwark against global conflict. We have stepped back from the precipice. Our children no longer wake from nightmares about thermonuclear war. Our contemporary nuclear fear, a dirty bomb or rogue nuke, is of a different variety, less cataclysmic. The massive armaments of deterrence do not make sense in the age of global terror. Not even the people of South Dakota who lived for so long with the Minutemen seem to want to tell the missiles’ stories. But these silences and spaces are as misleading as the quiet that fell over the missile fields during the Cold War’.
(Heefner 2012: 4)
Heefner continues by noting that around half of the Minuteman missiles that were deployed in the 1960s remain in service today, ‘still capable of reaching targets around the world as quickly as you could have a pizza delivered to your door’ (ibid.: 5). But it is not simply necessary to be aware of the continued presence of nuclear weapons. It is also important to understand them as embedded within geopolitical logics that to some degree predate these weapons. If we want to make sense of the missile silo and its counterpart, the bunker, then we need to take seriously the history of German geopolitics, a story that did not, as sometimes assumed, simply end in 1945, for the fantasy of conquering Lebensraum managed to survive precisely by going underground.
This book is informed by over nine years of research on German geopolitics and the Cold War. The empirical research was conducted during my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford (2013–2015) and I should therefore like to thank the School of Geography and the Environment for giving me the opportunity to pursue this project. The book was finished after I had taken up an Associate Professorship at the University of Oxford, in association with St John’s College.
It is difficult to acknowledge everyone who has had an input into this book. Key interlocutors have included the like‐minded bunker enthusiasts Brad Garrett (University of Sydney), Luke Bennett (Sheffield Hallam) and Silvia Berger‐Ziauddin (Universität Zürich), fellow researchers of geopolitics such as Mark Bassin (Södertörn Högskola) and Gonzalo Pozo (King’s College London), the architectural historian David Haney (University of Kent) as well as my old friends Ludek Stavinoha (University of East Anglia) and Caspar Richter. I would like to thank in particular my colleagues Gruia Badescu, Maan Barua (now University of Cambridge), Colin Clarke, Patricia Daley, Joe Gerlach (now University of Bristol), Britain Hopkins, Derek McCormack, Fiona McConnell, Tim Hodgetts, Craig Jeffrey (now at the Australia‐India Institute), Thomas Jellis, Kärg Kama, Judith Pallot, Brice Perombelon and Tim Schwanen for feedback and more general discussion on the themes of this book. I am especially indebted to the input and support I have received from my colleagues Linda McDowell and Richard Powell (now University of Cambridge). The seeds for the project were planted during my time at University College London, where in 2011 I completed my PhD, examined by Klaus Dodds (Royal Holloway) and Chris Browning (University of Warwick), and where I subsequently held a teaching position. At UCL I would in particular like to thank my former supervisor Felix Ciută for various forms of support and particularly for debate on the politics of war games. My thanks also go to Jason Dittmer (also UCL) for discussions on geopolitical architecture (and for co‐editing the book series Geopolitical Bodies, Material Worlds with me at Rowman and Littlefield) and to Alan Ingram (also UCL) for prompting me to think about the interface of geo‐ and biopolitics in the first place.
I am particularly grateful for a close reading of my third chapter to Christian Abrahamsson (Universitetet i Oslo), Lucian Ashworth (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Andrew Barry (University College London), Audra Mitchell (Wilfrid Laurier University) and David T. Murphy (Anderson University) at the 2016 ISRF workshop on ‘New earth thinking’, organised by Richard Powell at Girton College, Cambridge. I have hugely benefitted from discussion at the 2015 European International Studies Association (EISA) conference in Giardini‐Naxos, the 2014 and 2016 annual international conference of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS‐IBG) in London, the 2014 regional conference of the International Geographical Union (IGU), the 2014 and 2015 annual conventions of the International Studies Association (ISA) in Toronto and New Orleans as well as seminars and workshops in Birmingham, Fulda, London, Oxford, Potsdam, Uppsala and Sheffield. I have enjoyed the support of a number of very helpful archivists at the Federal Archives in Koblenz and the German Military Archives in Freiburg and would particularly like to mention Doris Hauschke at the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records in Berlin. I have also benefitted greatly from conversations with Jörg Diester at Dokumentionsstätte Regierungsbunker and am very happy to have received the right to print the two images of camp Bellersdorf from Bernd Donsbach at Traditionsverband Aartalkaserne. All other images used in the book are my own. Before I forget, I should probably mention my students at St John’s and Jesus College (particularly Harry Gibbs), with whom I have had the chance to debate various aspects of the material covered in Cryptic Concrete, and I am indebted also to two anonymous referees for the comments and suggestions and to the editor of the RGS‐IBG series at Wiley, Dave Featherstone (University of Glasgow), for his help and patience.1 All translations from the German are my own.
Last but certainly not least, I am particularly grateful for the support I have received from Anna (Toropova) who has been an absolute star in ways, academic and non‐academic, that are too many to list here. I would also like to thank my family, particularly Lizzie, Jost, Gerlinde and Klaus. This book is dedicated to my mother Linda (1953–2011).
Endnote
1
The book draws at times on some of my previous publications. My first thoughts on the topic were published in
Environment and Planning D
(Klinke 2015).
Chapter 6
is a redrafted version of a paper that came out in
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
(Klinke 2016). Elsewhere the book is in dialogue with a co‐authored piece that appeared in
Geopolitics
(Klinke & Perombelon 2015) and a number of shorter pieces I published as op‐eds online.
Chapter OneOf Blood and Soil
The Death of German Geopolitics
A concern with the politics of earth first emerged in Germany in the late nineteenth century as geographers like Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) and his disciple Karl Haushofer (1869–1946) sought to examine the causal influence that a nation’s position, climate or access to natural resources had on its rise and fall. In turning to the concepts and ideas popular in the natural sciences, ‘German geopolitics’ became known for developing a political theory that naturalised both the territorial configurations of global politics and the phenomenon of interstate war. Whilst geopolitical traditions were mushrooming elsewhere, too, German geopolitics was particular in its understanding of the state as a political life form (an organism) that tried to secure its survival by conquering and defending Lebensraum (living space). In the sense of articulating a theory of the interplay of life and earth, these ideas were biopolitical in as much as they were geopolitical. Indeed, we owe the terms ‘geopolitics’ and ‘biopolitics’ to Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922), another of Ratzel’s followers (Kjellén 1920: 94).
Much like Halford Mackinder’s perhaps more widely known brand of ‘British geopolitics’ (see in particular Kearns 2009; Mackinder 1904), German geopolitics was mesmerised by what it saw as the eternal struggle between land and sea power. Indeed, Haushofer argued for an alliance of the land powers of Germany and Russia to counter what he saw as the predominance of Anglo‐American naval power. Haushofer and his contemporaries furthermore displayed a Malthusian concern with overpopulation and desired for Germany to break out of its unfavourable centric position in Europe and establish a greater pan‐Germany (Haushofer 1926[1979]: 532). Preoccupied with the idea of autarky, German geopolitics also encouraged an economy that would be self‐sufficient rather than relying on trade with other nations. For Kjellén, the nation‐state should, ‘if necessary’, be able to survive autonomously – ‘behind closed doors’ (Kjellén 1917: 162).
The proponents of German geopolitics would soon make a name for themselves by promoting their view of states as organisms that could grow and shrink and that were rooted in the territorial ‘soil’ on which they stood. In dialogue with the Darwinian ideas of his time, Ratzel wrote about state behaviour as a relentless struggle for ‘survival’ or ‘being’ (Kampf ums Dasein), which he saw in fact as a struggle for space (Ratzel 1901). Germany, the geopoliticians felt, needed to expand its living space in order to survive. This led to an emphasis on territorial space as a marker of a state’s well‐being. Indeed, Rudolf Kjellén thought it less problematic for a state to experience population loss than territorial loss (Kjellén 1917: 57). Finally, geopolitics was obsessed with questions of death, extinction and ruination, leitmotifs that emerged both from a social Darwinian preoccupation with survival and extinction as well as from a cyclical understanding of history. A key medium for the proliferation of geopolitical ideas during the interwar period and into World War II was the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik, founded by Karl Haushofer and Kurt Vowinckel in 1924.
German geopolitics would perhaps have remained a footnote in world history had Karl Haushofer not in 1924 been introduced to the as yet comparatively unknown Austrian politician Adolf Hitler, who was then putting together his manifesto, Mein Kampf. Given the geopolitical tone of significant parts of Mein Kampf, Haushofer would later be credited in the United States as the mastermind behind Nazi foreign policy (Ó Tuathail 1996). This idea of Haushofer as an éminence grise whose fictitious Institut für Geopolitik guided Nazi foreign policy has since been shown to be a myth (Murphy 2014). In fact, Haushofer’s theory had ‘long been drowned out by Hitler's ever‐escalating pace of diplomatic crises, war, and extermination’ by the time of the attack on the Soviet Union (Herwig 1999: 236; see also Murphy 1997: 244). Although Nazi ideologues continued to publish on questions of Lebensraum well into the war (Daitz 1943), Haushofer and Ratzel’s geopolitics was in fact not in accord with Nazi ideology because it displayed an ambivalence towards the Third Reich’s biological theory of race (Bassin 1987a). Despite these crucial ideological differences and the fact that Haushofer had even fallen out of favour with the Nazis, he came under attack after the war and would subsequently commit suicide in 1946. His suicide note famously asked for him to be ‘forgotten and forgotten’ (Haushofer 1946).
The story of this ‘Faustian deal’ between German geopolitics and the Nazis (Barnes & Abrahamsson 2015: 64) remains a crucial episode within the history of the geographical discipline until this day.1 This story of German geopolitics is always told in much the same way, namely as that of a temporally confined period that starts with the publication of Ratzel’s Politische Geographie in 1897 and ends in 1946 with Haushofer’s suicide (Agnew 2003; Dodds 2007; Dittmer & Sharp 2014; Mamadouh, 2005; Ó Tuathail 1996). This, of course, does not mean that existing histories of geopolitics end in 1946, for geopolitics had a central role to play during the Cold War, as many observers have recognised (Dalby 1988, 1990; Dodds 2003; Ó Tuathail 1996). And yet, the existing literature has tended to see geopolitics as having managed to survive World War II precisely by renouncing its specifically German variant. In this reading, Cold War geopolitics, as it was articulated in the United States and elsewhere, is deemed to lack the biopolitical underside of a Ratzelian or Haushoferian geopolitics (Werber 2014: 143). This, as we will see, is certainly not the case.
Even in the work of those who have explicitly sought to explore the remains of German geopolitics after 1945, geopolitics is overwhelmingly seen to have been silenced in both the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In this vein, postwar German Geographers like Troll (1949: 135) and Boesler (1983: 44) would speak self‐evidentially of German geopolitics as having ‘collapsed’ (see also Michel 2016: 137). Others would suggest that the subdiscipline of political geography was ‘marginalised’ (Kost 1988: 2), whilst the wider discourses of geopolitics were ‘stigmatised’ (Kost 1989: 369). More recently, the historian Karl Schlögel (2011: 12) has bemoaned ‘a lost tradition’ of spatial thinking in Germany with the geographer Paul Reuber (2012: 90) writing of ‘decades of complete silence’ from geopolitical voices in German‐speaking academia. Others have gone so far as to suggest that the Federal Republic ‘civilianised’ its geopolitics after 1945, swapping jackboots for Birkenstock sandals (Bachmann 2009).2 We can find echoes of this kind of thinking in the idea that in the early twenty‐first century the so‐called ‘German question’ has only re‐emerged in geo‐economic rather than a geopolitical form (Kundnani 2014) or in the crude insistence that Germany is a ‘quasi‐pacifist’ power (Kaplan 2012: 11).
This idea of a ‘silence’ around geopolitical concepts and ideas would seem to imply that the Germans heeded to Karl Haushofer’s desire to disappear intellectually. In this way, observers have described his political testament as a ‘funereal summing up of the demise of German geopolitics following the Nazi defeat in World War II’ (Giles 1990: 13). But here we should not necessarily do Haushofer – or indeed his enemies – the favour of assuming that his ideas, and those of German geopolitics more generally, did indeed disappear alongside him. For although political geography was limited to the fringes of the geographical discipline in Germany and the terminology of geopolitics was indeed taboo in mainstream politics, this should not be read as evidence that all geopolitical writing was tabooed in Germany. Indeed, Bach and Peters (2002: 1) have remarked in passing that geopolitics ‘never ceased to be a factor in German politics’. As Sprengel noted as early as 1996, however, such claims remain to be investigated in detail (Sprengel 1996: 36).
This book, then, sets out to establish what happened to this politics of life and earth after 1945. It argues that the twentieth century witnessed a second attempt to put a programme of geo‐ and biopolitics into practice in Germany, for an obsession with questions of national survival and space re‐emerged through the equally geopolitical project of the Cold War in which the Bonn Republic, as the larger of the Third Reich’s successor states, participated enthusiastically in the 1950s and 1960s. Like the Third Reich, the Cold War too expressed its logic of survival and extermination in material form. This resurfacing, or rather submersion, of geo‐ and biopolitics in architectural form is puzzling given the seeming stigmatisation of geo‐ and biopolitics in post‐1945 Germany. Nazi imperialism and the medicalising logic of extermination was seen, first by the Allies but increasingly by the majority of Germans too, as the root cause of a catastrophe that was not merely national but global in scale.
If we wish to unpack the seeming paradox as to why a particular amalgamation of geo‐ and biopolitics managed to survive its own funeral, I argue that we need to take seriously not just the level of intellectual discourse, where Ratzelian and Haushoferian concepts would cautiously re‐emerge during the 1950s, but also pay attention to the militarised landscapes and subterranean spaces that the Cold War has left us with. For it is precisely here that we can get a sense of how this obsession with spaces of national survival managed itself to survive. As I will argue below, the Cold War turned the Nazi fantasy of the conquest for new Lebensraum into a more modest, though nevertheless bio‐ and geopolitical, fantasy of finding an Überlebensraum – a space of survival.
West Germany and the Bomb
After the demise of the Third Reich, Germany disappeared from the map of European politics as a major power. Given the extent of the German war crimes and the scale of its defeat, its two successor states had to tread carefully in the international arena. Founded in 1949, only three years after Karl Haushofer’s death, both the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic rejected not just the Third Reich’s politics of extermination but also the tradition of German geopolitical thought that was now seen to have been the driving force behind Nazi expansionism. Indeed, the term geopolitics was rarely used in West German mainstream political discourse in the decades after the war, other than to discredit an opponent.
Although geopolitics was thus tabooed as a mode of thought in West Germany, it is important not to be deceived here, for geopolitics, as a discourse on global power struggles, was still very much alive. Bound to its Western allies, the young West German state swiftly adopted a rather radical version of Cold War geopolitics. From the early 1950s onwards, anti‐Soviet sentiments would return to the fore, promoted by former Wehrmacht generals and the young republic’s political elites. Some of these new geopoliticians would soon become advisors to the new German army, the Bundeswehr, their ideas chiming well with Konrad Adenauer, the Federal Republic’s first chancellor (1949–1963). A devoted anti‐Communist, Adenauer (Figure 1.1) soon became known for his hardnosed ‘policy of strength’ vis‐à‐vis the Soviet Union (Politik der Stärke) and the unambiguous ‘Western orientation’ (Westbindung) of German foreign policy, both of which formed important parts of the country’s dominant foreign political narrative until the 1970s – and arguably after that, too.
Figure 1.1 Konrad Adenauer on a visit to the United States (1961).
Source: Das Bundesarchiv. Reproduced with permission.
Whilst Adenauer made sure to avoid the now discredited terminology of Lebensraum, his worldview was nevertheless geopolitical. In 1954, the same year that Time magazine made him ‘man of the year’, Life ran a special issue on the new West German ally, in which Adenauer was invited to lay out his vision. In true geopolitical manner, he explained to his American audience that ‘an Atlas of World History’ showed ‘much more directly’ than did written history that the ‘area of Europe‐Asia landmass in which freedom still prevail[ed]’ had become ‘frighteningly small in Europe since Russia’s power reached the Elbe’ (Adenauer 1954: 26). For Adenauer, the river Elbe, which served as a segment of the iron curtain, was no less than the boundary between Western civilisation and Eastern barbarism. In 1946, he famously warned that ‘Asia was on the river Elbe’, a statement that tapped into familiar racial representations of the Soviet Union (Adenauer 1946, see also Figure 1.2). Adenauer argued that the Soviet Union would simply ‘overrun the rest of Europe’ if it were to advance to the river Rhine (Adenauer 1949) and feared that ‘the aggressive imperialism of Soviet Russia’ would drive the United States out of Western Europe (Adenauer 1951). West Germany’s ideological compatibility with the Western Allies’ struggle with the USSR and its ‘strategic’ position in Central Europe was what permitted Adenauer’s Federal Republic to join the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in 1955.
Figure 1.2 Conservative election poster: ‘No – therefore CDU’ (1949).
Source: © Konrad‐Adenauer‐Stiftung, 2017. Reproduced with permission.
Whilst West Germany was integrating into a military alliance that was actively preparing for a war with the Soviet Union, it was of course also interested in preventing the outbreak of such a war. A Third World War was likely to turn nuclear and thereby threaten to devastate the country for a second time in the space of just a few years. As a semi‐sovereign state and a frontline territory, West Germany’s strategic choices were of course limited. But rather than experimenting with a policy of neutrality, successive West German governments were convinced that they could only secure the country’s independence from the Soviet Union by embracing the North Atlantic alliance and its policy of nuclear deterrence.
Indeed, Adenauer repeatedly rejected neutrality in the Cold War, claiming that ‘the winds would blow radioactive clouds even over a Germany […] that had declared itself to be neutral’ (Adenauer 1957). The administration in Bonn, the new West German capital, was thus broadly in favour of NATO’s nuclear arms buildup, for it felt that the irrationality of a nuclear war was the only chance to prevent a conventional war ‘on German soil’. Thus, after joining NATO in 1955, Bonn tried to lobby the alliance for a policy of hardline nuclear deterrence. Indeed, the young semi‐sovereign West German state had been keen to develop its own nuclear weapons programme, but had been forced to renounce any ambitions of acquiring atomic, biological or chemical weapons at an early stage. Too controversial was the idea that Bonn would accomplish what the Third Reich had failed to achieve. And yet, NATO soon worked out a compromise, the so‐called nuclear sharing initiative, which allowed non‐nuclear powers like West Germany to participate in nuclear planning, stationing and delivery of nuclear weapons. As a consequence, the West Germans could at least simulate some form of nuclear status.
