A while back I took the little red-haired girl into downtown Hamburg, stopping on the way to finally explore this huge, hulking mass of concrete about a mile west of the city centre. We must have ridden by it a hundred times already in the ten years we’ve lived here, but never went for a look inside.
It was built during the war and used to be a bunker. It’s one of many scattered throughout the city, most of which are now painted over and dressed up to blend so easily into the surrounding streets, you can go by them every day without noticing what it was originally built for. But this one is not only so much bigger than the others, it sits alone at the edge of a huge empty lot. You can’t miss it.
It was designed both for air raid flak defenses and as a bomb shelter for residents, completely self-contained with its own water, power generation and sewage removal systems.
Local legend has it that the British occupation forces wanted to level it after the war, but gave up after a few attempts to crack the two-metre-thick walls. Others say the concrete didn’t actually set to its hardest state until the 1970s – four decades after its construction – a claim I can neither verify nor refute, and neither can they, I bet.
Today it’s stuffed full of music stores stuffed with all kinds of musical instruments, but I liked just walking around inside, poking into corners and opening doors we probably shouldn’t have, wondering what it must have been like to scurry like rats into bunkers like these from a hail of bombs that over two nights in the middle of summer 1943 killed 50-thousand people in this city alone.
I wanted to climb up to the top of the staircase to see if we could go out onto the roof, but my daughter was having none of it. I could tell what was bugging her. It was kind of creepy walking through creaky old metal doorways, down dimly lit corridors and up spiral staircases of cold, bare concrete, and I wasn’t helping matters much with my off-track mutterings of the folly of man, the use of fear and demonisation of the enemy in preparation for war, how some people rightly or wrongly compare what’s happening in the United States of America today with what happened in Germany before things got really crazy, how some people today speak of Muslims - yes, the boys and girls sitting beside her in school – the way Hitler used to talk about the Jews, the concept of forced labour and its use in building the structure we were standing in, another enduring reminder of the extreme lengths human beings are willing to go in the pursuit of killing each other.
All she wanted to do that day was to hang out in the sunshine near the lake, and here I was dragging her through a bunker giving a rambling political science and history lesson. I can’t wait to take her down south near Munich to Dachau, and try to explain the unexplainable.
© 2008 lettershometoyou
PS: For a fabulous collection of b&w photographs of old industrial sites and urban decay, visit telefunker, a photoblogger from Belgium.
The banner photograph shows the town of Britannia Beach, BC, Canada, where I grew up. It's home. But I don't live there anymore.
Great post. It’s tough to bore the wee ones on such subjects, remembering back to how boring it seemed when we were small. But, man those are tough topics and should be discussed. I’m glad you went out in the sun!
Hi Gardner – thanks! The opportunity doesn’t come up that often to address this sort of thing, so I try to take advantage of it when it does without laying it on too thick. Sometimes you get carried away by the moment, though.
BTW, I’ve added a link since you commented – some great urban shots. – I
Hi Ian,
Assuming you find this at all and that I won’t have to email as well I’m dropping by to ask you to change your bookmark for my blog to http://bloggingtips.tumblr.com/
It will take me couple of more days before I start writing posts but the worst part of the move it over – YAY!
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hi timethief! I’ll update my links and keep up with your helpful tips on sorting out wordpress, and recommend others do the same. the forums are not at all what they used to be now that you’re gone, you know.
thanks for the link, telefunker’s images are wonderful. i like the two images you used with this post as well. did you take them?
Hi nurse – yes, i did take those photos. Telefunker’s put mine to shame, I must say.
The new blog layout is chic.
It’s not easy to deal with humanity’s dark history at any age. It is admirable that you try even on a sunny day.
Hi heza – so first time back in a while – must have been a bit of a shock, eh? It’s been up for about three weeks and I’m trying to sort a few thing out. One of them is the formatting of the post. Try this: click on the blog name, and you see the post in a wide format, click on the post title, up comes the post in a narrow format. This can throw text out of whack if it’s wrapped around a photo, or it can jut out like a sore thumb from the text if it’s cut too wide. I don’t know why it’s designed this way, but it makes layout rather hit-and-miss.
We went on a tour of one of the bunkers in Berlin (at Gesundbrunnen) last year. It’s half-demolished, they couldn’t blow up the other half because it would have collapsed onto the nearby railway tracks. The other two bunkers (Zoo and Friedrichshain) were certainly converted into piles of rubble. Apparently – and I write from memory here – the decision to demolish was a political one at the request of the Soviets; the city authorities were actually planning to use the bunkers for practical purposes such as a hospital. They also mentioned the Hamburg bunker, IIRC being in the British zone there was no need to demolish it, and it was used to house the NDR radio station.
Vienna still has all three of its bunkers, one is an aquarium, the other two are standing around waiting for someone to come up with a good idea.
The thing about concrete hardening is true, at least according to the documentary I saw.
nice shot of the bunker – we went there a week ago to take some video images for our next appearance in your city, it’s an impressive sight and kind of famous around hamburg. but yes, it smells of history, and it gives me the creeps. a little boy walked up to us and asked if we were taking pictures of the gulls – he couldn’t imagine why someone would want to film an old ugly hunk of concrete like that.
i’ll look into telefunker’s site. sounds very interesting.
bine – that huge empty lot is also used for the Hamburg Dom – an amusement park they spend what seems like weeks setting up and tearing down at least three times a year. When the Dom is in full swing it makes for quite a contrast: kiddies carrying cotton candy skipping along to their next funride midst bright lights and laughter right beside this looming, grey hunk of concrete.
mountpenguin – what amazes me is how easily most of them blend in. I was taking my daughter to a kindergarten for months before I realised the building beside the playground outside was a former bunker, painted to look like offices with trompe l’oeil and a bit of other trickery.
ian, we saw the dom last time we were in hamburg, in december i think. didn’t go anywhere close to it though, crowded places like this always give me an itch …
the telefunker’s work is beautiful. his pictures have that soft look of old daguerreotypes, i wonder what technique he uses. thank you for that link!
Really nice post about Hamburg. There is – or used to be – a photo story in there, with photo paper, chemicals, etc.
And somewhere at the end of the stairs you climbed there’s the back entrance of a music kneipe. A freight elevator takes you to the front entrance.
Hi Indie – I would like to go back in there and do some more exploring on my own, as well as take some photos from the top. It’s not the TV tower, but there would still be a good view, I bet.
Oh yes, dunno about the Hamburg one, but the Nazis had even thought of post-war uses for their Berlin bunkers and were planning to attach proper fassades to them, open cafés on the roof etc.
I usually read your posts thorough bloglines. I did notice a few bugs on this post through the feed. I couldn’t read a few lines so I clicked on the post link. I imagine it has to do with the CSS code and finding the differences for “post info” box between the different views. Still this is a nice choice for your blog.
hi heza – i have bloglines too – it’s a lot better than the google reader, I find. Don’t you find their image wall a bit addictive? I have to shut it off – it’s like visual crack.
And yes, I also notice that the feed is cut off on the right-hand side.
I could alter the CSS code with a low-cost upgrade, but I like to keep life simple. I know I would be pulling my hair out trying to do the first thing with code, so I’d definitely have to hire someone to get it right.