Email: meb10135@nyu.edu

(Apologies for the length of this response)

Diana Taylor’s fascinating text Villa Grimaldi made me reflect on my own experiences of visiting places similar to Villa Grimaldi – places in which traumatic events took place, and which become monuments to this traumatic history. These places raise questions of performativity of accounting for traumatic past, responsibility ingrained in witnessing, and trauma narratives’ susceptibility to becoming tools in state apparatus’s operations.

I would like to respond to Villa Grimaldi by sharing a few words about the Fortified Front Oder-Warthe-Bogen, my visits to this place, and what those visits taught me. Fortified Front Oder-Warthe-Bogen has a similar function to Villa Grimaldi, and I would like to share some insights about the way the traumatic memory is held and transformed in that space.

Fortified Front Oder-Warthe-Bogen, otherwise known as the East Wall (Ostwall), was a Nazi German fortified military defense line meant to protects Germany’s eastern side border with Poland. The fortification consists of a system of approx. 100 concrete defense structures interconnected with underground tunnels and bunkers. The fortification was built between 1934-1944 and was the most technologically advanced fortification project in Nazi Germany. The tunnels, which are 40 metres wide (131 feet) and span approx. 32-35 kilometers underground (20-22 miles), are one of the largest systems of this kind in the world. The fortification’s base is located near what today is known as a Polish city of Międzyrzecz. Half of my family is from Międzyrzecz and still lives there.

Today, the fortification has been partially transformed into a museum. Numerous questions can be raised and should be raised about the way such a site can be narrated about, by whom, to whom, and how. It also raises a question of the possibility of life inside of and on the surface of genocidal ruins. Is such a life possible, and if so, what kind of life?

Fortified Front Oder-Warthe-Bogen is a remnant of a terrible past. The site has undergone several transformations since the Nazi Germany’s failure, which reflect the state-sanctioned and local politics of the time and the site’s ongoing troubling of the present. When such a huge military project is erected and after it loses its original function, it is not an easy task to decide what to do with it. Below I will sketch out a few transitions that this site has undergone, and what it meant to the process of preserving and challenging its history, legacy, and its ongoing impact on the local community.

The site was captured by the Soviet Army in 1945 in as short as 3 days. The site turned out to be insufficiently equipped and staffed to withstand the Red Army. This fact always made me think that Nazi Germany, in its vanity, imagined itself to be capable of exterminating whole nations and governing who is worthy of living. It seems to me that the vastness of those underground tunnels in the East Wall and the fact that Nazi Germany was not able to sufficiently equip and staff them because of their vastness speaks to some kind of ingrained inevitability of failure of these kinds of genocidal projects.

After World War II, Poland was annexed into Soviet Union. While still remaining “a sovereign country” on paper, Poland had a satellite Soviet government until 1989 when, thanks to the efforts of the social movement “Solidarność,” Poland regained its independence from the Soviet power. But during the time of the Soviet dependence, something very strange happened in the Fortified Front Oder-Warthe-Bogen. Young people from the local city started gathering in the tunnels. These young people started planning actions of resistance that would later contribute to the “Solidarność” movement. The political underground born literally underground. Young Poles planning an anti-Soviet, anti-totalitarian action in the tunnels built by German Nazi to protect Germany from the East, after the tunnels were seized by the Soviet Army. How bizarre.

The Soviet powers tried to make use of all the space underground and transform it into a radioactive nuclear waste dump in the 1980s. Thanks to powerful local protests, this plan never materialized. But what an interesting element to consider in mapping the history of the site – a German Nazi military fortification was planned to be transformed into a Soviet nuclear waste dump. What does it mean to be located between Germany and Russia and how did a country like Poland resist the various forms of oppression coming from those different directions?

The East Wall is now a museum, and that’s the only way I have known it. The site attracts a varied crowd. Some of the most prominent groups of visitors which I have been able to identify are men who are now middle-aged but who used to gather in the tunnels as young oppositionists on the one hand, and men who are fascinated with anything to do with the military on the other hand. The East Wall is an impressive military project, therefore it attracts all sorts of fanatics of the military, war, and the army. In that sense, the museum’s proximity to military fanatism, alongside its dependence on state’s funding and state politics, creates a dangerous situation in which the violent military aspect of the fortification finds a way to renew and reinvent itself in a new, disguised form. As if traumatic memory had a dark and dangerous side to it – an uncontrollable force of violence’s repeatability, which can turn the victim into a performer of the aggresor’s role.

I would like to close this text with one last bizarre fact about this space. The tunnels of the East Wall are now the largest refuge to bats in the entire Europe. It is approximated that 35 000 bats live in those tunnels in the wintertime. It is as if non-human animals wanted to tell us: we will live amongst the ruins of this terrible thing. We will make it our home, and we will use its features to our advantage. We will thrive in the dark, moist, cold, kilometers-long underground tunnels. We will survive winters here. Terrible things happened, but we continue living. Or rather: terrible things happened, and we continue living.

Taylor, Diana. 2020. "Tortuous Routes: Four Walks through Villa Grimaldi" ¡Presente!: The Poetics of Presence. 175-202. Durham: Duke University Press,