Pictures at the
Hotel Armageddon
NYTimes - Published: January 11, 2004
In the final minutes of the movie "Dr. Strangelove
or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," with a nuclear
conflagration on the horizon, the only person in the Pentagon's war room who
remains upbeat about the prospect of mass annihilation is Strangelove himself.
Doing slide-rule calculations in his wheelchair, this proud father of the
Doomsday Machine assures the president and his generals that thousands of
Americans can ride out Armageddon inside the country's deeper mine shafts.
"Of course," Strangelove, the not-so-ex-Nazi,
says brightly, "it would be absolutely vital that our top government and
military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of
leadership and tradition." The men in the room listen raptly to his
proposal for a "ratio of 10 females to each male." As survivors, the
madman tells them, they should feel no guilt about the tens of millions
incinerated above ground but instead enjoy their new subterranean lives in
"a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead."
The 25 photographs by
Andreas Magdanz at
the Janet Borden Gallery in SoHo, from Saturday through Feb. 21, are like a
glimpse of Strangelove's demented vision of a nuclear sanctuary translated into
historical truth. One set of plans for a postnuclear-war world, it turns out,
were almost as fantastic — and banal — as those in Stanley Kubrick's 1964
satire. The Dienstelle
Marienthal (or Marienthal Office) is among the most ambitious but
least-known monuments to "thinking the unthinkable" ever conceived.
This vast underground tunnel complex, built from 1960 to 1972 outside Bonn, was
once so secret that to acknowledge its existence could bring charges of treason
in West Germany.
Designed to house 3,000 of that government's essential
personnel in case of nuclear attack, it represented one of the most exclusive
fraternities in the world. (Membership in the American version, under the
Greenbrier resort in West Virginia during President Dwight D. Eisenhower's
tenure, was even more restricted. It accommodated only 1,000 people. After the
535 members of Congress and their top aides were assigned spaces, little room
was left for anyone else hoping to survive.)
The Germans, however, built on a grander scale. The
mountain caverns in the Ahr Valley near Marienthal had been hollowed as a
railroad tunnel before World War I. Invading French troops dynamited passages,
and the place was abandoned until World War II, when the Nazi military
discovered that the cathedral-like spaces, beneath 350 feet of slate, were
ideal for assembling V-1 and V-2 rockets beyond the reach of Allied bombs.
After joining NATO in 1955, West Germany began to plan to use the site in case
of a nuclear war, expanding and upgrading it so that a community could live
deep underground, in theory, for at least a month.
There are 25,000 doors in the bunker complex at
Marienthal, only 38 of which open to the world outside. Among the hundreds of
rooms where the sun never shone are 897 offices and conference areas and 936
sleeping cubicles. Canteens, showers, medical areas, a printing shop, a hair
salon, a television studio and — most touchingly — a post office were provided
for the inhabitants, along with two large bays for bicycles, the chief form of
transportation around the nearly 12 miles of galleries and tunnels.
Mr. Magdanz, a 40-year-old German based in Aachen, began
the project in 1998 after reading a newspaper item about the structure. His
request to photograph it was grudgingly honored by the Interior Ministry, which
granted him a three-day permit. Persistence led to a seven-month extension. He
was the first person authorized to photograph there, although he had access to
only the three sectors in the east half of the complex. (There were five
sectors in all, linked but different.)
His photographic tour of the forbidden city — he shot more
than 1,000 negatives in both black and white and color with a large-format
camera, and also made a videotape — is not comforting. The government code name
for the complex was typically euphemistic: Rosengarten (or Rose Garden).
Monotony, regimentation and claustrophobic dread are the outstanding qualities
found in the pictures. The oppressive spotlessness of Marienthal is matched by
a complete lack of privacy. Only the West German president rated his own
bathroom and, in an incongruous visual note, also had a suite with chairs and
sofas upholstered in hot pink.
The weight of the mountain can be felt throughout the
photographs. With a precise and clinical eye, Mr. Magdanz shows the 25-ton
doors, the miles of cable and the air ducts that connected the underground
denizens, through a series of filters, with the upper atmosphere. The décor is
spare, the furniture uniformly modern. There are no gymnasiums or libraries.
Fluorescent light and gray airlessness are pervasive.
The saddest image may be a pair of chairs and a table in
front of a wall in a conference room. On the wall is a map with a label that
reads, "The World," a reminder of everything that, had nuclear war
broken out, the people here would be giving up by burrowing into this new,
shrunken but uncontaminated world.
The redeeming feature of Marienthal is that those who
could retreat quickly enough would be alive. It was a refuge as well as a feat
of German engineering. A defensive structure, it was planned not to kill but to
protect a select group from the insanity of atomic weapons. And unlike other
notorious Germans who hoped to survive a war from inside bunkers, these
political leaders would, presumably, not have started it.
The most distinguishing feature of Marienthal, apart from
the lingering paranoia, is the naïveté behind its creation. In the United
States, architects of cold war thinking — like Herman Kahn, a brilliant
strategist at the RAND Corporation (and a model for Strangelove), and the
Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara — dared to sketch the outlines of a
postnuclear-war world. They offered rational responses to various worst-case
scenarios, even though it seems clear that no amount of planning would help in
the face of unprecedented national panic. One need only imagine the traffic on
the roads after a 50-megaton weapon hit Washington or Bonn to know that a
quorum of government leaders would not likely arrive at these shelters alive.
The immaculate order of the empty rooms in Marienthal
seems to be inversely proportional to the mayhem that would be taking place
above ground in the event of a nuclear strike. Suppressed grief and emotional
denial can be read into the pictures. The German and American evacuation plans
take for granted that political leaders would abandon fathers, mothers, spouses
and children to their fates. But would such callous behavior really be the
case, and at what psychic price? Who would want to rule what was left from
Hades?
The response from many viewers to these pictures will be
nervous laughter. Stretched across the cover of Mr. Magdanz's self-published
book on the project is a cartoon of a B-52, the same type of rogue bomber,
piloted by Maj. T. J. (King) Kong of the Air Force, that triggered the Doomsday
Machine and the end of the world in "Dr. Strangelove."
The amount of money spent on Marienthal — more than three
billion marks (roughly $1.4 billion) — is not funny, though. The question of
how we are to treat our wildly expensive cold war relics is only now coming
into focus. The United States government has decided to reveal its secret
hideout and offers paid tours of the Greenbrier bunkers. The fees help defray
the cost of maintaining an atomic-age hotel built for 1,000.
The Germans have been typically quieter and more
conflicted about their past. Proposals to convert Marienthal and reopen it as a
techno-disco, a Bunker Wonderland amusement park and youth hostel or a mushroom
farm went nowhere. A decision was finally reached in 2000 to dismantle the
complex, at a an estimated cost of 100 million Euros ($120 million). In the end
the tunnels will be flooded, and Mr. Magdanz's photographs may soon be the most
lasting record of its existence.
No doubt there are secret bunker complexes being built or
considered here and elsewhere in case of a terrorist dirty bomb. But whether
they will offer any more lasting assurance than the Dienstelle Marienthal is a
question worth asking.
Richard B. Woodward is an arts
critic in New York.