Introduction: The Bunker’s After-Life: Cultural Production in the Ruins of the Cold War

This special issue explores how demilitarization and repurposing are still playing out within abandoned military bunkers of the Cold War era, 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Noting that the physical erasure of these bulky defensive fortifications is practically impossible, the Introduction shows how the contributors’ common concern is to explore the ways in which new uses and new meanings are applied to these stubborn structures. By adopting a notably broad definition of ‘cultural production’ (one which can accommodate mould, acoustics and irony as cultural phenomena) the Introduction demonstrates how the contributors find these places — through their embodied exploration and archival enquiry — to be anything but dead or trapped by their past militaristic purposes. Instead, the bunker’s after-life is found to be a matter of ongoing cultural production, acting out through a variety of contemporary appropriations: some of them contested and some of them playfully indeterminate.