From The New Yorker, July 27:
In the mid-nineteen-seventies, the West German Army, the Bundeswehr,
built a vast underground bunker near the town of Traben-Trarbach. It was
five stories deep, had nearly sixty thousand square feet of floor
space, and was designed to withstand a nuclear attack. Eighty days’
worth of survival provisions were stored inside, including an emergency
power supply and more than a million litres of drinking water. You
entered the facility through an air lock; the interior temperature was
set to seventy degrees. The walls were concrete, thirty-one inches
thick, and some were lined with copper.
The rooms were soundproof and
transmission-proof. Between 1978 and 2012, the bunker was the
headquarters of the Bundeswehr’s meteorological division, and at any one
time about three hundred and fifty civilian contractors worked there;
most of them focussed on predicting and plotting weather patterns
wherever the German military was deployed. New employees often got lost.
On each level, the walls were painted a different color, to help people
orient themselves—but the bunker was symmetrical, so one side looked
much like another. There was no natural light. In winter, workers on day
shifts arrived in the dark and left in the dark.
In 2012, the Bundeswehr moved its meteorological division to another
site. Germany’s federal real-estate agency, known as BImA, listed the
bunker for three hundred and fifty thousand euros. The low price
reflected the unusual nature of the property and the expense of
maintaining it. The bunker sat beneath a plot of some thirty acres, in a
forested area on a hill outside Traben-Trarbach, which is an hour east
of the Belgian border. The perimeter of the property was marked by
ramparts and a fence, and aboveground the site contained several large
structures, including a gatehouse, an office building, a tall aerial
with satellite dishes, a helipad, and barracks constructed by the Nazis
in 1933. The Bundeswehr had employed twelve men, who worked in shifts
around the clock, solely to insure that the bunker was properly
ventilated and did not flood. The German government hoped that a
technology business, or perhaps a hotel, might want the premises, but
there were few prospective buyers.
The relocation of the Bundeswehr division was a blow to the local
economy. Traben-Trarbach is a fairy-tale town that straddles a bend in
the wide, teal-blue Mosel River. Traben is on the north bank, Trarbach
on the south. The town, which is overlooked by a ruined
fourteenth-century castle, is full of aesthetic quirks and highly
caloric delicacies. Only about six thousand people live there, but
thousands of tourists arrive every summer to hike, drink the local
Riesling, and take river cruises. At the turn of the twentieth century,
Traben-Trarbach was a wine-trading hub second only to Bordeaux, and also
a center of the Jugendstil movement, the German iteration of Art
Nouveau; many of its buildings reflect the wealth and the brio of that
period. Near the hotel where I stayed in December, a Jugendstil relief
of Rapunzel adorned the side of an apartment building. Her gilded hair
fell in wavy lines from the fourth floor to the second.
The mayor of Traben-Trarbach, Patrice-Christian-Roger Langer, a
garrulous man with a fine gray beard, worked at the bunker complex for
nearly thirty years, and for eleven of them he operated its mainframe
computer. He enjoyed his time working underground. But, he told me, “not
everybody could deal with working in a bunker,” adding, “It’s a mental
thing . . . if you don’t have a window.”
In 2012, a foundation controlled by a fifty-three-year-old Dutchman
named Herman-Johan Xennt proposed to buy the bunker complex. Xennt
travelled to Traben-Trarbach to explain his plans to a closed session of
the town council. He was a striking man, with a cascade of
shoulder-length gray-blond hair, and wore a dark suit, which highlighted
the pallor of his face. Xennt told the council that he intended to set
up a Web-hosting business at the bunker complex, and promised to create
as many as a hundred jobs for local people, but he was vague when
pressed for details....
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