For years, Paul Virilio explored the German bunkers along the coast of Brittany. His Bunker Archaeology has now been published in a new edition by Spector Books – a historical document that is more relevant today than ever.
Sandra Hofmeister
Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, Florian Ebner, Sophie Virilio, Jan Wenzel (edd.), Spector Books, Leipzig 2025 → order now
Polar Inertia
What might Paul Virilio (1931–2018) have said about deepfakes and artificial intelligence? As early as the 1980s, the cultural critic and philosopher had identified a kind of social acceleration, which he recognised as the cause of a state of motionless, perpetual agitation. In Polar Inertia (1990), Virilio described this state: speed then replaces activity, and the loss of space as an experience goes hand in hand with a presence that leads to dislocation and disorientation. Virilio died in 2018. Looking back, the question arises as to whether he did not foresee our present with astonishing precision?
© Sophie Virilio
Walks along the Atlantic coast
In the late 1950s, Virilio – then in his mid-twenties – began travelling to the Atlantic coast time and again to explore the Nazi bunkers from the Second World War. For over ten years, he travelled to Brittany with his family, summer and winter alike, to photograph the abandoned Nazi strongholds and write about them – relics of a war that lay in the landscape like foreign objects.
© Sophie Virilio
Monolith on the beach
“The seaside villas were empty; everything that obstructed the bunkers’ line of fire had been blown up, the beaches were mined, and the sappers were setting to work here and there to clear a path to the sea,” recalls Virilio in the foreword. He saw the bunkers not merely as military architecture, but also as an expression of a way of thinking about space, power and perception. Analogies between tombs and bunkers, the absurdity of their seaside locations, the sheer scale of the grey monoliths—some with no openings save for air vents—and the female first names given to the structures: Virilio recognised that the bunkers, on the one hand, belong to a past that bears archaeological traits, and on the other, are also part of a future that seems as radically removed from our time as the past itself.
© Sophie Virilio
Stories of Disappearance
The black-and-white photographs of the bunkers in this book are striking, and Virilio’s prose is simple and accessible – a cultural analysis that situates war within its broader social context. There is a chapter on Albert Speer and a photographic section entitled ‘The Aesthetics of Disappearance’. This section features bunker complexes that are slowly vanishing into the dunes on the beach and becoming invisible. Virilio’s photographs were first exhibited in 1975 at the Musée des arts décoratifs in Paris.
The new edition of Bunker Archaeology comes at just the right time, as it casts the classic text in a new light: defence and attack, war imagery and military superiority – many of Virilio’s observations have taken on a frightening new relevance in the wake of the war in Ukraine.
Paul Virilio
Bunker Archäologie
Florian Ebner, Sophie Virilio, Jan Wenzel (edd.)
22x26 cm, 212 Seiten
102 s/w Abbildungen, Hardcover
Design: Helmut Völter, Ina Kwon
Spector Books, Leipzig 2025
ISBN 9783959057349
