Abstract
The bunkerization of Europe is a Cold War story that has continued to resonate into the 21st century through foreign policy, the built environment, and cultural traces both material and imaginary. This essay explores the physical, ideological, and cultural bunkerization of Switzerland, one of the most heavily fortified countries in the world, through its military and civil defense history, the spatial manifestations of that history, and the cultural responses to these manifestations during and after the Cold War. The essay compares the unusually democratic process of the Swiss civil defense infrastructure and its ramifications for thinking about the spatial legacy of the Cold War with the bunker fantasy in the United States and the rest of Europe.
Keywords
Early on in my research on bunkers and Cold War infrastructure, as I was taking the photo of an entrance to one of the defense networks beneath the Swiss Alps (which is not reproduced here, for reasons that will become clear), an official-looking man drove up and told me that I was breaking the law. It was illegal to take a picture, he said; it was even illegal to take an unauthorized look at this threshold, despite its being in plain view on public land. This came as particularly frustrating news to me, as I had spent the better part of a morning hiking mountain trails in search of just such a look. Earlier, believing I had finally made some progress in my quest, I had happened to chance on a convoy of trucks halted at a security barrier at the edge of the mountainside woods. Politely but firmly turned away by heavily armed soldiers, I had accepted a truck driver’s offer of a ride back down into the riverside town where I had first disembarked from the Swiss Rail train. It was when he had dropped me on the outskirts of the town that I found myself looking through a high wrought-iron gate straight into the heart of the same mountain I had earlier climbed, into a tunnel easily wide enough to accommodate trucks and armored vehicles like those I had encountered much farther up. But here is the twist; the accusing driver who would find me there snapping away with my camera, rather than arrest me in good old Cold War fashion and confiscate my film (or flash drive as the case was here), invited me back to his home, introduced me to his family, offered me lunch, and plied me with pamphlets and books describing those parts of the subterranean defense network that I might be allowed to know about. I have since determined that this combination of secrecy and openness is fully characteristic of the Swiss attitude toward its extensive military and its equally extensive civil defense networks. As essayist John McPhee put it in his 1983 book, La Place de la Concorde Suisse, “‘About this we don’t talk,’ a colonel on the general staff said to me one day. ‘Don’t ask me about it. But keep your eyes open. You may see something’” (p. 21). Display and obscurity have always been at play in the bunker fantasies that have structured much of the relationship between the world’s belligerent powers since early in the past century. As befits a country that has always defined itself at arm’s length from those powers, Switzerland is an extreme and idiosyncratic permutation of the bunker fantasy, but these qualities have made it a useful one for thinking about the post-1989 legacy of this cornerstone of Cold War ideology and architecture and the ways in which it has echoed through the cultural practices of the past half century or more.
The bunkerization of Europe is a Cold War story that has continued to resonate into the 21st century through foreign policy, the built environment, and cultural traces ranging from physical habitus to literature and film, from overt end-of-the-century reckonings such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) or Emir Kusturica’s Underground (1995) to the more recent rise of bunker-related tourism and the beginning of a scholarly attempt to address the peculiarities of Cold War architecture on its own terms. This architecture, as journalist Tom Vanderbilt (2010) suggests, “has nothing to do with buildings. It refers to security arrangements . . . to a web of relationships formed to maintain order . . . but embodied in no actual structure” (p. 16). Nuclear war, as philosopher Jacques Derrida argued, is “fabulously textual, through and through,” something “one can only talk and write about,” because it has not yet and, in a sense, cannot ever take place, since if it did, there would be no “place” remaining (p. 23). Derrida’s conception of nuclear war as always only something to be represented extends an earlier response to the traumatic events of the mid-1940s as something that cannot ever properly be represented. The difference—and here Derrida suggests the end of the Nuclear Age even as he is characterizing it—is that he was talking in 1984 about an enormous body of texts that do represent what cannot be represented. “Literature has always belonged to the nuclear epoch,” he goes on to say (p. 27). One can take Derrida in strict deconstructionist terms as rejecting the possibility of any kind of positive meaning, any materiality. But one can also read him against the grain for the realization that there is meaning in the vast corpus of Nuclear Age culture, as there is meaning in any form of textuality. As Vanderbilt (2010) continues, after he has begun by negating the idea of a material Cold War architecture, there are, in fact, innumerable Cold War “structures” (p. 17); the problem is that we simply have no heuristic yet for understanding them as meaningful, as architecture rather than as endlessly repeating, anonymously and ominously concrete structures, built only to deal with death, instantly and overwhelmingly.
The core symbols of a bunkerized Europe were the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, of which it was the physical manifestation; the European Union continues to struggle with the consequences of the principle of openness generated in part as a reaction to that divisive barrier. 1 But there is also much to be learned from the more fully realized bunker fantasies of European outliers. Switzerland’s mountainous topography and situation at the crossroads between the north, south, east, and west of Europe has always made it simultaneously vulnerable and easy to defend. The Swiss were able to fend off invasion numerous times before the 19th century, gained their neutrality in 1815, and have preserved themselves inviolate in the two centuries since, with surrender to Napoleon the exception that proved the rule of their independent and self-reliant identity—he was so impressed with the Swiss army that he hired their guards for his own elite force. The Swiss have a long history of fortification, but they undertook a radically new bunkering plan during the 1970s, attempting to safeguard their borders and their neutrality under the sign of the hedgehog, embracing as its strategy the threat at any time of rolling the entire nation into a prickly ball able to repulse any attempt to approach it.
The example of Switzerland offers one limited case of the role played by civil defense and of the fraught relationship between security and democracy in the modern world. Unusually, Switzerland’s policy is strongly democratic: It has been openly debated for centuries, continues to be subject to periodic national votes and other transparent democratic processes, and remains central to a national myth of collective resistance and of “armed neutrality.” As one of the most thoroughgoing realizations of the bunker fantasy in the world, 2 the Swiss example raises compelling questions about the motivations, promises, and limitations of the bunker fantasy during its heyday at the height of the Cold War and its legacy in the decades since it appears to have been made redundant. For, while the hedgehog metaphor neatly conjures the living and breathing force of this myth, it is incapable of dealing with the well-nigh indestructible fact of the concrete constructions whereby this myth has been materialized into its mountainous landscape.
The Principle of Reduction
With a visual correlative in the jagged mountains of the nation’s southern, alpine borders, the hedgehog has resonated as an image through Swiss history. However, the defining moment of its identity as a fortified nation crystallized around a geographic amplification of that image, the conception of the “Réduit national” or “Alpenreduit,” the national redoubt proposed by General Henri Guisan in his Rütli Report of July 25, 1940. 3 In this report, Guisan articulated a new defensive strategy in the light of three factors: French defeat, a geographical position sandwiched between the Axis forces of Germany and Italy, and the likelihood of invasion from either direction. Guisan took the radical decision to “reduce” the defense of Switzerland to a fortified enclave defined by its topography and to concede the loss of the central plateau in order to create, in effect, “the largest fortress in Europe” (Rapin, 2004, p. 89). By blocking passage from the north as well as from the south, the redoubt would function as a double Maginot line. Excavating deep within the mountains themselves would create a networked shelter-fortress capable of garrisoning the entire Swiss army. How much of the retreating civilian population would also have been brought into this enormous fortress is still debated today, and it is an important question, since the strategy of withdrawal necessitated the sacrifice of the Mittelland, the central plain where most of the Swiss population lives, works, farms, and produces. As the eminent left-wing Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1986) trenchantly expressed the issue in the postwar years, “The idea of the Redoubt was a brilliant idea. It consisted in the army saving itself and leaving the people in the lurch” (p. 46). Or, as McPhee (1983) put it more charitably and reflectively, “The only place that will never need defending represents what the Swiss defend” (p. 11). Although undertaken on a vast physical scale in the Swiss landscape during and after the war years, the redoubt was also a profoundly symbolic gesture, aimed at persuading the German forces that the Swiss had the resolve to sacrifice their vulnerable heartland and general populace in order to enable effective long-term resistance. In short, the redoubt depended on the equation of Switzerland as a nation with the entity of the Swiss army. Not surprisingly, the leitmotif of Dürrenmatt’s (1986) long-term opposition to the concept of a Swiss military was the assertion “I can imagine a Switzerland without an army.” The very need for such a seemingly self-evident assertion testifies to the ideological force of Switzerland as an army and the country as a redoubt.
Such equations, arguably, were characteristic of the Second World War in general. This is not only because of the stark ideological divide between the Axis powers and the Allies (putting aside the vexed question of the Soviet Union) that facilitated a strong identification between civilian and armed forces. Even more so, this was the first large-scale “total war” in the modern era, in which civilian populations were as much if not more of a target than the military forces on either side. In the aftermath of such a war, the concept of a national redoubt came rather quickly to look like common sense as much as a military necessity. The difference—and this is where the bunker fantasy proper emerges from its parentage in the ancient “spirit of fortification”—is that the threat of conventional invasion that had mobilized the Swiss to fortify their alpine redoubt soon became the threat of invasion from the air in general and of nuclear bombing by warplanes in particular. As the Cold War settled into the early 1960s, the central redoubt was supplemented by legislation for a shelter and militia system diffused throughout the nation. 4 The redoubt remained the focal point of the myth of national defense and a deterrent to any land invasion, whether or not accompanied by atomic, biological, or chemical weapons, but the broader goal of civil defense became survival wherever one was: The spirit of fortification was extended into the bunker fantasy. This could range from elaborate private shelters in individual homes to the world’s largest nuclear shelter, in the Sonnenberg Tunnel near Lucerne (now demolished), with a capacity of 20,000 and fully equipped with sleeping quarters, 5-foot-thick doors, sophisticated air filters, a prison, and everything the army would need to conduct the defense of the nation from within its confines (Foulkes, 2007). 5
The possession of nuclear weapons established a qualitative distinction between great powers and lesser states. Switzerland debated and ultimately decided against acquiring such weapons if the opportunity offered itself. The consequent structural inequality with the nuclear powers brought new types of comparison as Swiss military strategists sought to reconceive the army’s function. Vietnam became a touchstone (Israel having been ruled out as model once nuclear armament had been ruled out), with two elements of its successful defiance of the French and then the U.S. forces particularly relevant: the “front-less” battle and the transformation of the countryside into a “molehill” of tunnels. Summing up the findings of a 1966 report that was the first to confront directly the prospect of “ABC” (atomic-biological-chemical) warfare, Commandant Alfred Ernst (1971) argued that the success of Israel in 1967 showed the need for better training and the positive outcome from defying conventional wisdom, while Vietnam demonstrated the effectiveness of hidden troops and Kleinkrieg, or guerilla warfare. Like a number of military strategists, Ernst continued to argue for the acquisition of nuclear weapons. Addressing security issues at the end of the century, Bernard Wicht (1998) added to the now venerable example of Vietnam the more recent conflicts in Beirut, Korramshar, Kabul, Panama City, Gaza, Vukovar, Sarajevo, Mogadishu, and Grozny, all successful combinations of old-fashioned armaments and fighting with “a consummate art of digging in, of fortification and of making use of the underground,” itself partly reliant on the modern technology of subterranean urban construction (pp. 28, 37).
There is an undeniable irony in seeing a wealthy and secure western European nation that has flourished for centuries at the nexus of international trade and banking decide to model its defense system on those of some of the most dysfunctional, unstable, and dangerous cities in the world. This irony has not gone unnoticed by those taking a more jaundiced view of the military–industrial complex and a more cynical view of Swiss neutrality and security. Until the end of the Cold War, attitudes toward the shelter system were starkly divided between a militaristic right and a pacifist left, with eminent writers such as Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch coming out strongly against the whole conception of a shelter society, and others such as Igaal Niddam, Jean-Marc Lovay, and Jean Delarue similarly producing novels and films that used the idea of shelter as a conceptual framework for a satirical critique of Swiss society. “The Swiss,” asserted Dürrenmatt in 1986, echoing sentiments he had been voicing since the late 1950s, “are the most frightened people in the world.” It was not the Alpine redoubt that had forestalled a Nazi invasion, he argued, but the fact that economic collaboration had eliminated any need for invasion. Even today, he went on, “what really protects us is trade, not the army.” Neutrality, Dürrenmatt insisted, was an illusion, and if there were to be war between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Soviet Union, Switzerland would never survive without the support of the former. Echoes of these sentiments can be found throughout the pacifist and oppositional literature, as when Jean-Gabriel Zufferey (1989) took on the question of the “hedgehog syndrome” in Le syndrome du hérisson: la Suisse et son armée. Already in 1966, Switzerland’s other world-class postwar author, Max Frisch (1966-1985/1986), was diagnosing the “security-mentality” in terms of an inability to conceptualize the future: “What do the Swiss want from their future: their past?” (p. 14). The Alpine redoubt and the hedgehog mentality, Frisch implied, were fundamentally conservative ideologies inimical to any conceptualization of radical change: “Belief in the possibility of peace (and also in the survival of mankind) is a revolutionary belief” (p. 23).
Like Dürrenmatt, Frisch wrote out of the polarized terms of the Cold War, which divided all propositions into stark antinomies. What is so peculiar about the bunker fantasy, and one of the reasons it appealed to all sides in the conflict, is that it did, in fact, imagine a different future than simply a return to the past and was able to posit the survival of humankind in the same breath as its total destruction. And one of the reasons for the survival of the bunker fantasy beyond the Cold War that gave it form, and beyond the Cold War literature so much of which violently opposed it, is how aptly this spatial fantasy embodies the contradictions of the post-1989 world. In the past quarter century, the unthinkable possibility of the instant destruction of the entire world seems to have receded into the background. However, it has been replaced by something perhaps more terrifying and harder to conceptualize—the continuing march of the world along that same path toward destruction, not instantaneously, but slowly, inexorably, and gaining momentum daily. The bunker fantasy is the way we think about both moments at once, retaining, faintly but unmistakably, a belief in the possibility of survival and peace which we seem able only to express in the face of catastrophe. This fantasy has proven to be the mode of existence that best makes sense of a world that defines itself in terms of a constant, rather than an imminent, state of emergency.
Cold War absolutism thus tinges any Swiss writing that would be anything but unambiguously supportive of the Alpine redoubt and civil defense measures, the stance taken by the vast majority of writing on civil defense, most of it authored by the officer corps and most of it written in German. In his 1973 novella Dienstbüchlein (the title refers to the little record book in which each male citizen of Switzerland is required to record the history of his adult time of service in the militia), Frisch (1973/1989) records with cutting irony his experience of the concept of the redoubt at first hand while serving during the Second World War: The new concept: reduit. That’s where they would get stuck with their panzer units. I remember how this concept relieved me. I don’t remember its ever being discussed among enlisted men. . . . On flat land—at that time sitting under the apple trees near Zurich—I could readily picture the German Wehrmacht (up to then known only from photos), swarms of armored cars, and so on. But not here. Here one almost forgot them. No question that our general staff took its own concept seriously. There was visible evidence: construction of dugouts in the mountains (for which I once had to draft blueprints in a military office) and munitions magazines in the rock, bombproof at a glance. How supply lines were supposed to function after the bridges had been blown up, and, come to think of it, how the general staff imagined we could fight after the loss of our industries and cities—such things, of course, they couldn’t explain to us. (p. 139)
To be sure, Frisch’s (1973/1989) aging narrator maintains a mocking distance from the callow youth that was “relieved” by the concept of the redoubt, able to “forget” the tanks once high up in the mountains, and happy to be permitted not to worry about practical matters such as “supply lines,” “the loss of our industries and cities,” or “our families under German occupation while we are in the mountains” (p. 139). Those were the terms of the Cold War, unable to credit that, however immature, selfish, and impractical those feelings of relief might have been, they were none the less real or existent for being immature, selfish, and impractical.
What the bunker fantasy did was to take the traditionally calculating rationality of military strategy from which we are meant to be repelled in Frisch’s texts and place it in an apocalyptic setting. If the world is being destroyed, the moral calculus changes, and hope for the future, anybody’s future, comes to be predicated on the loss of most of humanity, including “our families.” This principle, again, could easily be expressed satirically, as when Dr. Strangelove assures the top brass that the prechosen survivors will be taken down below in advance of the spectacle of destruction that would otherwise traumatize them and prevent them from devoting themselves to their appointed task of repopulating the world. It could be expressed tactically, as in the well-known American debates over the ethical balance between protecting your own family in its private shelter and admitting desperate individuals who had failed to look after their own, echoed memorably in a 1961 Twilight Zone episode called “The Shelter.” And it could even be expressed positively. Whether or not Frisch is consciously evoking it, there is an angry dose of Christian apocalypticism in his formulation, as also of the Genesis figures Lot and Noah. Not all shelter-builders or preppers, as they call themselves today, are Christian, but the imagery of Revelation and the many other depictions of the Last Judgment in the Western tradition resonate powerfully within the idea of a bunker sheltering those who thought to prepare ahead for the last days and shutting out those who did not, between the wheat and the chaff of Jesus’s harsh parable of nature’s cycles. That conception may have been secularized in warfare through to the end of the Second World War, but when the first bombs dropped, the only existent iconography even partly able to make sense of its results was imaginations of apocalypse. Add to this the fact that, very soon, the possibility of nuclear war came to mean, quite literally, the end of the world, and it starts to appear reasonable to take the “fantasy” in the bunker fantasy as seriously in its positive valence as in the derogatory way in which Frisch, Kubrick, and many others on their side of the Cold War took it at the time.
One major artistic text emerged from Switzerland out of the first bunker age of the 1960s that directly engaged the meaning of survival in this context. In Le troisième cri (Niddam, 1974), the maintenance crew of an immense public fallout shelter is trapped inside. The key premise of the film is that the crew members do not know whether they are locked in because there has been a nuclear war of which they may be the only survivors or if it was simply a mechanical failure or an accident that sealed them off from the outside world. The social cross-section of characters suggests the inevitable national allegory, for which the Swiss shelter system provides such a powerful ruling metaphor. 6 At the same time, as Buache (1998) notes in his analysis of the film, Niddam directs it in a sufficiently realistic style to prevent the allegory from dominating the viewer’s experience of the film. A good measure of the film’s power, in other words, comes from its ability to present the events as if they were actually happening. Le troisième cri is balanced between the eternal waiting in uncertainty characteristic of the atomic age, the existentialist attitude toward life consonant with that age, and the everyday reality of life in a country ruled by the bunker fantasy, for better and for worse. As Buache persuasively argues, the allegorical reading wins out in the end, when the bunker finally leads the crew members to an insight into the modern condition: “Preserved from the apocalypse thanks to their luxuriously provisioned cocoon (pool, hospital and kitchen, neat hallways and armor-plated doors), they come to understand that their former values were twisted” (p. 252). Inevitably, at least for a pre-1989 European art film, the balance resolves itself in death (the meaning of the “third cry” of the title, following the “first cry” of birth and the “second cry” of love).
In the postwar Swiss context, however, it appears that the question of national identity, whether expressed positively, as by supporters of the civilian military, or negatively, as by many writers, intellectuals, and left-leaning politicians, can be done so only through the spatial medium of the bunker fantasy. As Jean-Marc Lovay’s (1987) narrator sarcastically observes of the French-, German-, and Italian-speaking authors assembled with a handful of foreign observers in a writer’s union meeting deep in a mountain bunker, “Never had I witnessed such a fraternal scene” (p. 25). How does one think outside the bunker fantasy if that fantasy is the only glue holding together a federation of otherwise disparate peoples? As the presence of foreign observers testifies, Lovay appears also to be suggesting that the same principle may apply to the world as a whole: all that unites it is the fact of existence under the specter of apocalypse. This is simultaneously an existential situation, in that it presents a compelling image of the human condition, and a sociopolitical one. Like Frisch before him, Lovay mocks the world’s inability to think beyond the constraints of immediate survival; however, unlike Frisch, he allows a glimmer of the possibility that even the most negatively formulated common ground might constitute the beginning of a pragmatic movement toward collective action.
The Right to Shelter
Claude Delarue’s (1989/2011) award-winning novel, Waiting for the End of the World, published just before the end of the Cold War, reaches a similarly bleak conclusion in its detailed and nuanced depiction of the Swiss bunker fantasy. Waiting for the End of the World takes as its subject the legacy of one Samuel Leber, an architect who devoted his life to the design and production of fallout shelters, growing extremely wealthy in the process. It is the most sustained fictional meditation written to date on the paradoxes of Switzerland’s bunker fantasy, and it is unrelenting in its exploration of the principle that ethical motivations can lead to violent and often damaging actions. Delarue combines the abstract fatalism of a high modernist novel such as Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain with the stylized sex and violence of hard-boiled crime fiction. The bulk of the novel depicts the developing relationship between the protagonist, a monk and professional secretary cum wheelchair pusher, and his new employer, Leber’s widow Olga Grekova-Leber, a former theater actor who has been crippled in the bizarre “accident” that killed her husband. The setting is her husband’s alpine fortress, a baroque mélange of medieval fortifications, the modernist design of the mad architect’s stronghold in Edgar Ulmer’s horror classic of repressed wartime trauma, The Black Cat (1934), and the neomedievalism of King Ludwig of Bavaria’s concrete folly Neuschwanstein. The surrounding grounds of the fortress are enclosed by “the Great Wall,” a boundary fence tens of miles in circumference, built to prevent Leber’s free-ranging menagerie of the region’s former predators (bears, wolves, wildcats) from terrorizing the nearby villages. Accessible only by the rickety funicular in which the architect met his death, a treacherous mountain road, or helicopter, the fortress shelters, along with the architect’s writings and Olga’s ever-expanding collection of newspaper clippings of tragic events around the world, a Colombian cook, a bevy of Tamil servants accompanied by their holy man, and Tanguy, the gamekeeper and bastard son of the previous owner whose descent into madness drives the more lurid of the plot’s events.
The fortress sits atop a vast multistoried fallout shelter designed to receive hundreds if not thousands of soldiers and local civilians in time of need. This shelter looms beneath the consciousness of the novel for most of its pages, but at its midpoint, the secretary descends into its depths in the company of the engineer tasked with its maintenance. Delarue (1989/1992) masterfully describes the engineering genius involved in the creation of such a complex technological space, while devoting equal attention to the consequences of its inorganic isolation from the natural world. It is also here that the secretary reveals one of the novel’s central secrets, that in addition to being a wheelchair pusher he has consistently granted to each of his invalid wards, starting with his own mother, the gift of a desired death in the form of direct or indirect manslaughter. As he explains to the engineer, who is somewhat nonplussed by the unsolicited confidence, “We’re so far from God down here. We aren’t anywhere, not even enduring ordeal by suffering. We can say anything, knowing it won’t have any repercussions, yet still nothing eases the pain” (p. 143). The bunker, in this formulation, becomes something of the limit case of a world without God, and its freedom—everything can be said without consequences—is also its torment, because nothing that is said consoles. The condition of the bunker—that everything will be sacrificed to ensure survival—equally describes the contemporary world, where nature as such has ceased to exist, subsumed within human solipsism. Everything, Olga argues at one point about her husband, was subordinated to his fear of death. “War was merely a pretext, and he would have been quite happy to cover the whole planet with shelters just to protect himself and no one else” (p. 104). Delarue deftly limns the transition from traditionally apocalyptic imagery to the even more disturbing vision of disaster that would come to dominate after the Cold War. “We are living on a dead man’s planet,” Olga maintains. “We’re dead too, fated to wither, not to be consumed by fire” (p. 103).
In their introduction to a volume of translations of Swiss writings on the United States, the volume’s editors note the “apparent preoccupation with the United States” in contemporary Swiss fiction (Schnauber, Sabalius, & Stimpson, 1995, p. vii). They cite the imperfect analogy between the “Swiss dream” of a confederation of diverse peoples and the U.S. “melting pot” and the contrast of a “small, locked-in state” with the expansive openness of the United States. America, they suggest, has provided an important tool of “self-critique” for postwar Swiss writers (Schnauber et al., 1995, p. vii). The editors do not mention civil defense or fallout shelters, and neither the concept nor the setting figures prominently in their selections. However, as Delarue (1989/1992) makes evident in discussions of Leber’s dealings with the Americans in Waiting for the End of the World, the bunker fantasy constitutes both a profound common ground between the Swiss and the United States and an accurate measure of the absolute distance between the two nations. Here is Olga on the ironic outcome of her husband’s dealings with the Americans: Unfortunately, the Americans didn’t know how to build hiding places where their missiles would be safe from attack. When Samuel went to the States to get hold of the necessary guarantees about setting up the Leber Foundation and to make sure that his shelters would be built on US soil, he met people from the army general staff, various politicians and engineers. The plan was given unanimous approval and within a few months several shelters were under construction, north of New York and Washington and south of Houston. Once he’d made sure of pulling off this victory, he came home. It was at this point that they dealt him the final blow. The Americans used the material he’d invented for his fallout shelters to build silos to house their missiles. When Samuel told me about this betrayal, I don’t know what came over me, but I couldn’t stop myself bursting out laughing—good and evil cast in the same concrete! (pp. 68-69)
In a paradox analogous to being able to say anything without being consoled by doing so, the shelter designed to preserve life from thermonuclear missiles is appropriated to shelter the missiles themselves: “Good and evil cast in the same concrete.” Olga’s laugh is a mocking acknowledgment of her husband’s idealistic ignorance of the world, of the ability of that world to distort any good intentions, and of the fundamentally compromised target of her husband’s idealism. But her concluding formulation also acknowledges a truth enacted elsewhere in Delarue’s novel by the heat of the genre conventions that he imports into the cold abstractions of high modernism: Whatever its evident and undeniable coldness, concrete is the 20th-century residuum not only of the cold military calculations of mass destruction but also of hot passions and warm ideals. It may appear desiccated from the outside but somehow penetrates within, and the presence of your body changes everything. As Army Captain Pierre Delévaux (2011) unironically asserts about a very similar space from a very different perspective, A work of fortification, however well placed, however well-conceived, however well-armed it may be, is worth nothing without the troop that occupies it, without its spirit of camaraderie, its will, its preparedness, and its pride to belong to this work. (p. 31)
Because it poses the relationship between organic and inorganic nature in such a stark manner, the bunker has lent itself to expressing the hostility of shelter and the inhumanity of the war that necessitates such shelter. We tend to forget the lived experience that equally radiates from these spaces, not only no matter how inhospitable they appear but also in fact in direct proportion to that appearance of inhospitableness.
Perhaps no writer has captured this paradox as well as McPhee (1983) in his book-length essay on the Swiss military, La Place de la Concorde Suisse. In McPhee’s rendering, Switzerland is a country torn between imperatives of openness and secrecy. On the one hand, “Switzerland has so much to hide,” not just the identity of holders of its bank accounts but also the militarization and fortification of the very natural beauty that drives its tourism industry: Thorn and rose, there is scarcely a scene in Switzerland that would not sell a calendar, and—valley after valley, mountain after mountain, village after village, page after page—there is scarcely a scene in Switzerland that is not ready to erupt in fire to repel an invasive war. (p. 21)
The centuries of openness to visitors that have made of the Swiss landscape one of the most intensively cultivated expanses of wildness in the world have also made it one of the most intensively fortified expanses of wildness in the world, ready in the blink of an eye to destroy itself to save itself.
That McPhee was permitted to embed himself in a civilian militia unit in this secretive army is further evidence of this paradox, as is the choice by military authorities to embed him with a unit of French Swiss misfits rather than exemplary German Swiss. Here is how McPhee (2013) epitomized the memorable experience when writing some 30 years later about his on-site research: In 1982, I was walking around in the Alps with a patrol of Swiss soldiers. We had been together three weeks and were plenty compatible. Straying off limits, not for the first time, we went into a restaurant called Restaurant. Military exercises were going on involving mortars and artillery up and down the Rhone Valley, above which the cantilevered Restaurant was fourteen hundred feet high. The soldiers had a two-way radio with which to receive orders, be given information, or report intelligence to the Command Post. They stirred their fondue with its antenna. They sent coded messages to the Command Post: “
For all of their “straying off limits,” the civilian soldiers never reveal any actual secrets to the American reporter. Nor is there ever any question that, in a real emergency, they would do anything other than defend their homeland. In their giddy drunken joking, McPhee (1983) captures the sheer excess of the bunker fantasy, the way it gives the illusion of power over circumstances so far beyond one’s control that they are impossible even to countenance. The counterfactuality of what the unit is reporting is what makes it such a good joke, even as the soldiers also take absolutely seriously the premise that counterfactuality is in fact the situation they are preparing to defend themselves against.
As McPhee (1983) suggests, the only possible way perhaps to survive a nuclear war is constantly to live within its shadow, to devise a usable ending in order to ward off the specter of a difficult one. In an extraordinary, extended scene in the town of Brig, the townspeople continue to go about their daily business as soldiers fight, live ammunition flies, and shells explode around them in a complicated military exercise. “Such a deep token of preparedness implies a deeper history of threat,” McPhee aptly observes (p. 108). There is no direct judgment made, nor any direct comparison with the bunker fantasy in the United States. Nevertheless, given that McPhee began his career in journalism at the height of Cold War tensions in the early 1960s and chose an explicitly Cold War topic as an established journalist in the early 1980s of Reaganism, it is difficult not to read an American subtext into the essay. So, there is an undertone of shock over the way in which this extraordinary natural landscape has been seamed with human endeavor of the most technologized and destructive kind, such as when he realizes that it is possible to ascend an entire mountain by tunnels carved within it. Nevertheless, this shock primarily expresses itself as bemusement, such as when the troop emerges from a steep climb 1,400 feet up the Rhone valley only to happen, “With some surprise, as always . . . onto a curving mountain road” leading to the fondue restaurant where the essay will conclude (p. 148). If you are forced to live in a bunker fantasy and go down in a nuclear war, he seems to say, you might as well do it in style, full of good food and drink and company and with a sense of humor. In contrast to the bon vivant vintner guide Massy, the humorless Major Jaussi, whose family has been in the hotel business for generations, has, in fact, like many of the officers, studied in the United States. That Jaussi’s work experience abroad included a stint at the Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs (McPhee, 1983), which for decades hid in plain sight within its walls a top-secret bunker designed for the protection of Congress, may merely be a delicious coincidence; this does not prevent it also from making a subtle yet effective comparison of two ways of dealing with the nuclear threat. 7
Writing about the principle of “equality of security” long after its blown cover had turned Greenbrier from a haven for the top brass into a destination for nuclear tourism, the American moral philosopher Elaine Scarry (2010) made explicit the comparison McPhee had only intimated. For Scarry (2010), the Swiss shelter system is “a feat of moral and civil engineering” that presents “one of the few pieces of evidence we have that the right of exit (as well as the ‘right to exist’) is still imaginable in the nuclear age” (p. 69). 8 In contrast, she argues that the abandonment by most Western powers of the project, or even the principle, of sheltering all their populations has profoundly compromised the basis of contractual democracy in these countries. She goes on to contrast the Swiss refusal to acquire nuclear arms with the way in which the broader populations of all eight of the current nuclear powers have ceded the control of nuclear weapons to a single individual or small group of individuals. Scarry’s argument is indicative of the way in which contemporary thinking about nuclear war and national security can finally be formulated outside the polarized terms of Cold War debate. In her view, equality of security is both a practical issue and a political one. In practical terms, she argues, we must take the security risk seriously because the U.S. government takes it seriously. For why would the government spend billions of dollars on shelters for its members and for the military if it did not expect them to be necessary? The only distinction between U.S. spending and Swiss spending on security is that in one case a select elite is provided for and in the other case it is the entire population. Whether Scarry is making this argument rhetorically to emphasize the fundamental inequality of contemporary American democracy or whether she really believes in the need for or eventual utility of the shelters is irrelevant. Only by taking them seriously, she suggests, can we come to grips with the meaning of the shelters within the contemporary political process. Dismissing them as militaristic lunacy, as was typical of leftist thinking during the Cold War, can only, in the current context, obscure what is really at stake. Emergency preparedness, she notes, is, in fact, a fundamental component of organized society, predating democracy itself. Moreover, because the United States and the world more generally have, since the Cold War and especially since the World Trade Center bombings of 9/11/2001, been governed as if in an ongoing state of emergency, an analysis according to the terms of emergency preparedness is the only way to provide an accurate account of the current political situation.
Consequently, Scarry (2010) introduces the premise that “nuclear weapons—their possession, threatened use, or use—reenact on a vast scale the structural features of torture” (p. xv). Because they permit no form of self-defense and their use will not be authorized by the legislature or the general population, nuclear weapons nullify the requirements of contractual society and destroy the foundational concept of the law. What is fundamentally different between Scarry’s argument and traditional antinuclear arguments is that she begins from the premise that states of emergency have always existed and that “habits of emergency preparedness” are essential to democracy rather than contrary to it. In other words, while she continues to argue that the existence of nuclear weapons undermines the principles of a functional democracy, she is mostly concerned with a more general application of the “right of exit.” Implicit in Scarry’s proposal is an awareness of contemporary theories of globalization such as Naomi Klein’s (2007) account of “disaster capitalism” that would identify the state of emergency as a defining characteristic of capitalism and thus an enduring feature of modernity. Put another way, Scarry (2010) is arguing that the bunker fantasy is fundamental not only to the recognition of the extreme juncture to which modernity has led us—the impending end of the world so readily recognized by anyone alive back during the Cold War—but, more important, to any mode of thinking beyond the polarities of the Cold War. And that thinking, she implies, must begin with a recognition of the democratic and even utopian principles wrought up within the apocalyptic reasoning that spurs the bunker fantasy. No wonder, then, that she sees in Switzerland a prime example, not of the prickly insular hedgehog but of the legacy of the Rousseauvian enlightenment, the Geneva Convention, and the rule of law.
Because so much of the system remains active, there has thus far been less active redevelopment of the Swiss underground for tourism or creative reuse than in other formerly heavily fortified areas such as Albania, Germany, the United States, or the Kinmen and Matsu archipelagoes in the Taiwan Strait. In 2009, conceptual artists Frank and Patrik Riklin and Daniel Charbonnier opened the 29-euro-a-night “Zero Star Hostel” in a former bunker in Teufen, Switzerland, but not much other activity has been in evidence, even as the left-wing literary attention has faded along with the Cold War. The relative paucity of any imaginary surrounding the Swiss fortifications since 1989 testifies simultaneously to its ongoing presence in everyday life and to its productive function within the political process. In the United States, and in many other parts of the world seamed with Cold War fortifications, the enduring symbolism of the built environment continues to overwhelm the attempt to think them through in a meaning distinct from that symbolism. Consequently, that history remains a black hole of meaninglessness within American and global postwar history, meaningful neither on its own terms nor in relationship to the transformative social and cultural movements that occurred during its decades in power: civil rights, feminism, LGBT rights, rock-n-roll, and the rise of drug culture and the counterculture. We are starting to get hints of such a reading, as when Thomas Pynchon’s 2013 novel of 9/11 New York, Bleeding Edge, bottoms out deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean beyond Montauk in the physical equivalent of the dark Internet, “some faith in brute depth” that hides unconscionable Cold War secrets that threaten to unmoor our sense of time and space. But our eyes, like those of Maxine Tarnow, Pynchon’s protagonist, are diverted from this ostensible zero point toward more immediate and more comprehensible catastrophes, never exactly to return to it. So, whether we regard Switzerland as a country swallowed up by the security obsession that has never let it escape from Cold War paradigms or as a country that has successfully negotiated the democratic demand for openness with the secrecy required for equality of security, there is no question that the Swiss have come to terms with the open secrets of their past in a way in which the symbolic but impossible-to-countenance weight of Cold War culture suggests that few other nations, and certainly not the United States, have.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.