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CULTURE

Bunkers trade NATO nukes for art

Some of the world’s most prominent modern artists have been brought together in a unique exhibition at complex of Cold War bunkers outside Koblenz. Michael Woodhead reports.

Published: 25 June 2010 15:46 CEST
Bunkers trade NATO nukes for art
Photo: Michael Woodhead

The woods surrounding Montabaur in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate have become an unusual cultural centre for artists. Instead of housing NATO’s nuclear warheads as it once did, a complex of abandoned bunkers is now home to a nascent artist colony.

Dubbed Project B-05, the centre has even attracted the likes of legendary German director Werner Herzog, who is known to be picky over where his art is shown. His short film on the hellish scenes of burning oil wells after the first Gulf War was the centre piece of the exhibition ‘Traces of the Sun,’ subtitled ‘An Apocalyptic Opera.’

“He was reluctant to allow us to have it at first and asked for a five figure sum,” said the curator Oliver Zybok. “Then when the concept of the bunkers now becoming a centre for art was explained to him it caught his imagination. After all his film is about the horrors of war, so he let us have it for what I can only say was a nominal sum.”

Zybok has also put together the current exhibition ‘Optical Shift – The Pleasure of Illusion and Deception.’

“People said they liked the first two shows which were serious and weighty themes dealing with melancholy and the apocalypse and told us what they now wanted was to have a bit fun. So I had the idea of showing the many aspects of the art of illusion,” he said.

For the first time at B-05 some twenty artists have been brought together covering an international field. They include Adolf Luther, Thomas Ruff, Anthony McDonald and Bridget Riley.

All play with the notion of deceiving the onlooker into believing what they are seeing when in reality the object of their fascination is not what it appears. For example, the work of Rowena Dring, who studied at Chelsea College of Art and Goldsmiths College, looks like a landscape painting but is in fact an incredible patchwork of thousands of cloth pieces sown together.

“I grew up in a family of needle workers, so I value the art of sowing and thought of a way of bringing this skill into my art,” she said. “When I began doing this in the late nineties it was actually quite a difficult time to be a painter. I began with patchwork of cottages around my home town in Bedfordshire, which I thought would be amusing to portray.”

Since then her work has become dramatically more complex and intricate. “Without a computer it would be almost impossible to work out the size, shape and colour of each piece,” she said.

The bunkers were part of a network of secret NATO munitions depots, some housing nuclear warheads, built under American supervision, to counter the threat of a Soviet attack on Western Europe. They are so massive that demolishing them was financially ruinous so they were left in place and the entire camp locked and deserted.

“I remembered the camp as a child as a mysterious place in the forest where nobody was allowed to go. And when I returned to Germany after living in Los Angeles for much of my adult life I came and looked having heard it was desolate and dilapidated and nobody had any idea what to do with it apart from let nature run riot,” said Jan Nebgen.

It was on his initiative that led to the creation of B-05, with ‘B’ standing for bunker and ‘05’ the year he had the vision to begin the project. Training as a designer, he had been instrumental in setting up exhibitions in California, which he admits with a smile somehow had, unintentionally, bunkers as a theme.

“It was raining and there was fog,” he said, recalling his first sight of the Montabaur munitions camp. “It felt very eerie as I reached the big main gates and saw the warning sign still there that said you would be shot if you came too close. I went around the site and the bunkers emerged one by one out of the mist still camouflaged and now overgrown with vegetation.”

Through sheer persistence and conviction Nebgen managed to persuade skeptical regional officials in Mainz and Montabaur to allow him to fulfill his dream of a creating an artist’s colony. The state of Rhineland-Palatinate eventually gave the project support through its ministry for education, science and culture.

“I think what appeals to anyone who comes here and everyone I have explained the concept to, is the notion that a place that was once used to store weapons of mass destruction is now a place where we celebrate life and culture instead of human destruction,” he said.

It took almost two years of hard work to clear the undergrowth and renovate the camp. During this time Nebgen persuaded several companies to sponsor the centre. His breakthrough came when Skoda Deutschland agreed to become the lead benefactor and partner.

“Every big city has its museum which makes these bunkers totally different,” said curator Zybok. “The area is perfect for showing every kind of media and here you see art in human and natural setting.”

Optical Shift – Illusion und Täusching

June 27 – October 17

B-05 in Montabaur

Opening times

Thurs 11:00 am – 6:00 pm

Sat 2:00 pm – 7:00 pm

Sun 11:00 am – 6.00 pm

Admission: €5 adults, €4 pensioners, €3 students

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DISCOVER GERMANY

Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

With thousands of years of history in Germany to explore, you’re never going to run out of museums to scratch the itch to learn about and fully experience the world of the past.

Published: 5 April 2024 10:46 CEST
Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

Here are eight of our favourite museums across Germany’s 16 states for you to discover for yourself. 

Arche Nebra

Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt

One day, around 1600 BCE, local Bronze Age peoples buried one of their most precious objects – the Nebra Sky Disk, a copper, gold, and bronze disk that acted as a calendar to help them plant crops. This was a matter of life and death at the time. 

Over three thousand years later, in 1999, it was uncovered by black market treasure hunters, becoming Germany’s most significant archaeological find. 

While the Sky Disk itself is kept in the (really very good)  State Museum of Pre- and Early History in nearby Halle, the site of the discovery is marked by the Arche Nebra, a museum explaining prehistoric astronomy and the cultural practices of the people who made it. 

Kids will love the planetarium, explaining how the disk was used. 

Atomkeller Museum

Halgerloch, Baden-Württemberg

From the distant to the very recent past – in this case, the Nazi atomic weapons programme. Even as defeat loomed, Nazi scientists such as Werner Heisenberg were trying to develop a nuclear bomb. 

While this mainly took place in Berlin, an old beer cellar under the town of Halgerloch, south of Stuttgart, was commandeered as the site of a prototype fission reactor. 

A squad of American soldiers captured and dismantled the reactor as the war ended. Still, the site was later turned into a museum documenting German efforts to create a working reactor – one that they could use to develop a bomb.

It’s important to note that you don’t need to be a physicist to understand what they were trying to do here, as the explanatory materials describe the scientist’s efforts in a manner that is easy to understand. 

German National Museum

Nuremberg, Bavaria

Remember that scene at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, where an unnamed government official wheels the Ark of the Covenant into an anonymous government warehouse? This could possibly be the German equivalent – albeit far better presented. 

The German National Museum was created in 1852 as a repository for the cultural history of the German nation – even before the country’s founding. In the intervening 170 years, it’s grown to swallow an entire city block of Nuremberg, covering 60,000 years of history and hundreds of thousands of objects. 

If it relates to the history of Germany since prehistoric times, you’re likely to find it here.

Highlights include several original paintings and etchings by Albrecht Dürer, the mysterious Bronze Age ‘Gold Hats’, one of Europe’s most significant collections of costuming and musical instruments, and a vast display of weapons, armour and firearms. 

European Hansemuseum

Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein

In the late Middle Ages, the political and economic centre of the world was focused on the North Sea and the Baltic German coasts. 

This was the domain of the Hanseatic League, one of the most powerful trading alliances in human history. Centuries before the Dutch and British East India Companies, they made in-roads to far-flung corners.

The European Hansemuseum in the former Hanseatic city of Lübeck tells the story of the league’s rise and eventual fall, its day-to-day operations, and its enduring legacy.

This museum is fascinating for adults and kids. It uses original artefacts and high-tech interactive elements to tell tales of maritime adventure. Younger visitors will also be enchanted by the museum’s augmented reality phone app that asks them to help solve mysteries. 

Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum

Augsburg, Germany

The Hanseatic League was not the only economic power in the late Middle Ages. The Fugger and Welser families of Augsburg may have been the richest in the world until the 20th century.

From humble beginnings, both families grew to become incredibly powerful moneylenders, funding many of the wars of the 16th century and the conquest of the New World.

The Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum not only explains the rise of both patrician families but also the practices that led to their inconceivable wealth—including, sadly, the start of the Transatlantic slave trade. 

The museum also documents the short-lived Welser colony in Venezuela, which, if it had survived, could have resulted in a very different world history.

This museum has many high tech displays, making it a very exciting experience for moguls of any age.

Teutoburg Forest Museum

Kalkriese, Lower Saxony

Every German child learns this story at some point: One day at the end of summer 9 AD, three legions of the Roman army marched into the Teutoburg forest… and never came out. 

Soldiers sent after the vanished legions discovered that they had been slaughtered to a man.

Arminius, a German who had been raised as a Roman commander, had betrayed the three legions to local Germanic tribes, who ambushed them while marching through the forest. 

Today, the probable site of the battle – we can’t entirely be sure – is marked by a museum called the Varusschlacht Museum (Literally ‘Varus Battle Museum’, named after the loyal Roman commander). 

The highlights here are the finds – made all the more eerie by the knowledge that they were looted and discarded from the legionaries in the hours following the ambush. 

German Romanticism Museum

Frankfurt, Hesse

The Romantic era of art, music and literature is one of Germany’s greatest cultural gifts to the world, encompassing the work of poets such as Goethe and Schiller, composers like Beethoven and artists in the vein of Caspar David Friedrich.

Established in 2021 next to the house where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born, the German Romanticism Museum is the world’s largest collection of objects related to the Romantic movement. 

In addition to artefacts from some of the greatest names in German romanticism, in 2024, you’ll find a major exhibition exploring Goethe’s controversial 1774 novel, ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, and another on the forest as depicted as dark and dramatic in the art of the period. 

Gutenberg Castle

Haßmersheim, Baden-Württemberg

Sometimes being a smaller castle is a good thing. The relatively small size and location of Guttenburg Castle, above the River Neckar near Heilbronn, protected it from war and damage over eight hundred years – it’s now the best preserved Staufer-era castle in the country.

While the castle is still occupied by the Barons of Gemmingen-Guttenberg, the castle now also contains a museum, that uses the remarkably well-preserved castle interiors to explore centuries of its history – and the individuals that passed through it.

After you’ve explored the museum—and the current exhibition that uses Lego to document life in the Middle Ages —it’s also possible to eat at the castle’s tavern and stay overnight!

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