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Abstract
The image of the ‘bunker’ has a deep resonance in contemporary organisational discourse. This paper seeks to explore the link between this metaphor and the materiality of the bunker as a physical site of organisation. The twentieth‐century origins of the bunker lie within the rise of aerial bombardment. The bunker, as a structure, is a triumph of function over form, yet it somehow also resonates at a symbolic level – either by invocation of the abject circumstances of Hitler’s final days in his Berlin bunker or in the celluloid imaginings of the nuclear command bunker during the Cold War. In each case the materiality, the ‘concrete’ essence, of the bunker weaves in and out of its symbolic existence. This paper also considers the fate of these bunkers and what their ruins leave for us as traces of the essentialist organisational life lived in extremis by those who dwelt within them.
Notes
1. The motives, methods and meanings of such amateur ‘bunkerologists’ and their exploration of abandoned bunkers form the focus of a separate study by the author (Bennett forthcoming).
2. All photographs are the author’s own and are reproduced with author’s permission.
3. Albania is an extreme example of this phenomenon – between 1950 and the death of dictator Enver Hoxa in 1985 an estimated 700,000 pillboxes were emplaced across the country to repel the perceived threat of foreign invasion (Howden Citation2002).
4. Calder (Citation1991, 42, 60) cites official UK pre‐war predictions of 600,000 air‐raid deaths and an actual death toll of 60,000. By contrast, Calder estimates that up to 50,000 residents of Dresden may have died in the 13–14 February 1945 air raids alone.
5. Albert Speer was Armaments Minister, with responsibility for German factories and infrastructure. At the Nuremberg war trials, he was spared a death sentence because evidence showed that he had opposed Hitler’s ‘Nero’ Decree of 19 March 1945, an order calling for the destruction of Germany’s civil infrastructure, and had planned an abortive assassination attempt upon Hitler in the Führerbunker.
6. In ancient Greek and Roman literature a three‐headed hound which guarded the gates of Hades (Hell).
7. Von Stauffenberg led Valkyrie, the unsuccessful 20 July 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler in the Wolf’s Lair bunker.
8. Speer also acknowledges Boullée as an admired influence upon his Nazi architectural style (Citation1975, 232).
9. Furthermore Virilio (Citation1989, 64) notes that the production designer of both Star Wars (Lucas Citation1977) and Alien (Scott Citation1979) was influenced by Adam’s Dr. Strangelove control room design. We might therefore speculate that depictions of spaceship interiors in contemporary fiction owe much to attempts to depict Cold War bunkers.
10. In a post‐modern turn an ex‐nuclear bunker in Stockholm is reported to have been refitted as a command centre ‘in the style of Ken Adam’ as part of its redevelopment as a secure data centre (Judge Citation2008).
11. See Curtis (Citation2008) for a critique of the conventional view that the hurricane was chaotic. Curtis argues that the weather system was in Deleuzo‐Guattarian terms a ‘nomad’, an alternative organised (non‐human) system.
12. This quote is taken from an interview with an amateur ‘bunkerologist’ who traces and visits abandoned bunkers as a hobby, see Bennett (Citationforthcoming).
