European diary, 29.10.2020: It is now possible to book guided tours of the bunker. As museum people we want to have a look at it, of course. And as Europeans.
In Switzerland, in South Tyrol… everywhere bunkers open their hidden entrances. People are only interested in it because it is bizarre. Or do the bunkers already fit into our time again? Autumn mood prevails everywhere. Instead of the winter season, everyone is waiting to see how high the second wave will be. Everybody bunkers in.
Above the Swiss border town of St. Margrethen, where the Alpine Rhine flows into Lake Constance, the former Heldsberg Fortress is hidden behind a few dummies of single-family homes on the mountainside. Instead of petty bourgeois idyll, cannons and machine guns wait there behind false curtains. And miles and miles of corridors, between crew rooms, field hospital, canteen and turbines for autonomous power supply. That should be enough for two weeks of siege, the museum guide tells us.
In the South Tyrolean Vinschgau Valley, the bunkers lie around on the green meadows, as if one had forgotten to pick them up. Here, too, they have adapted a little to the prevailing idyll, are overgrown, the concrete is slowly deteriorating, cracks are appearing.
When people in Berlin were still fervently singing “from the Maas to the Memel, from the Etsch to the Belt”, Mussolini prepared himself for the Germans to take these things seriously. And set up his guard at the Brenner Pass below the Reschen as well. Nothing came of the war between fascists and Nazis after all. In 1937, the Italian fascists instead passed their anti-Semitic Jewish laws and soon expected more advantages from going out with the Nazis to conquer the world.
Today, the Adige river rushes past the remnants of this rare example of a somehow missed war as if nothing had happened. Past the battlefields of the First World War, which took place two thousand meters higher and killed thousands of people here at Ortler, mainly by cold. And also past the meadows along the Calven, where long before that, in 1499, an army from the Grisons had driven the Austrian armies to flight. The peace-loving “Swiss” bypassed the Habsburgs and cleverly stabbed them in the back. After a few thousand soldiers were killed and the Habsburg mercenaries ran away in panic, the Grisons massacred the local population. The attempts of the hated Habsburgs to retain their influence in the areas of what would later become Switzerland were soon over.
Everywhere grass grows here, colorful autumn leaves fall over the battlefields, the bloody slaughters, as well as the fascist muscle games. Even the cannons behind the false curtains in Heldsberg are only there for the pleasure of the visitors, who are allowed to do target practice with them. On Bregenz, Lustenau and Hohenems, across the border. A strange anxiety does not fail to appear when one’s own place of life appears so sharply in the riflescope. From there, from Hohenems or Bregenz, the Swiss expected a possible German attack from 1938 on.
Despite all the nationalist flaming, despite all the paralyzing eccentricity in dealing with the pandemic, despite all the outdoing in the new discipline of political coldness when it comes to solidarity with those seeking protection: when walking along the Adige river, between the fascist bunkers and early modern battlefields, all this may seem surreal. An optimistic autumn mood, so to speak.