Ruins and Fragments: Air War's Mnemonic Architectures
Revolving around Arne Schmitt’s photo series "Bunkererfahrung/ Bunker Experience" (2013), the essay engages with two discourses: 1) theoretical and artistic positions treating the bunker as a mnemonic space of war and modernism, including works by Paul Virilio, Magdalena Jetelová, Jane and Louise Wilson, and Robert Kusmirowski; and 2) debates about the air war and the role it played within West German postwar culture, initiated by W.G. Sebald, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge. Schmitt’s bunker series ties into these debates, as it makes a visual argument for the return of the bunker in the concrete structures of postwar modernism. It is hence not focusing on the space of the bunker itself but on its afterimage. By doing so, Schmitt not only examines the experience of war through the lens of the postwar but also suggests that we can access the trauma of the air war through that which has taken its place.