Silvia Berger Ziauddin

In the 1960s Switzerland started to build the world's largest system of civil defense shelters. Ever since, the tiny country has represented the gold standard for bunker design and technology, attracting worldwide interest amongst scientists, political elites, and private consumers. This essay examines the development, forms, and global reach of Swiss bunker expertise. It emphasizes the knowledge transfer and the networks of cooperation with West Germany and the United States upon which the career of Swiss bunker research was founded. At the same time, attention is drawn to the translation processes by which knowledge was locally adapted and technoscientific expertise was gained, strategically diffused, and marketed, thereby securing Swiss predominance in the field. In sum, the present study of Swiss bunker expertise showcases the often-ridiculed civil defense programs of the atomic age as a fertile ground for historians of cold war science and technology, allowing us to reveal a whole range of relevant and detailed engagements with nuclear practices and technology apart from completed atomic bombs. The essay also makes a case for exploring cold war scientific and technological achievements in a transnational frame while not losing sight of local conditions, national and economic interests, and narratives.

This paper explores the worldwide unprecedented bunker infrastructure of Switzerland. Since the 1960s, the country has built hundreds of thousands of nuclear bomb shelters in family homes. Drawing on poststructural theories of social practice and ritual theory, the all-pervasive structures in the private sphere are analyzed as transitory spaces that coordinate the movement and connections between different milieus, regimes, and bodies. By studying the operational scripts of the authorities and the spatial arrangements and artifacts of the shelter, the paper argues that a sequenced set of “rites of passage” were to be practiced in order to guarantee a transition into the postapocalypse without any violations of norms, social roles, and affective regimes. However, this “territorializing” process launched by the state with the aim of engineering a “bomb-proof” society met with little success. By ignoring, distorting, or violating the constant prewar situation in their homes, Swiss people, as early as in the 1970s, started to undermine the shelter as an instance of concrete governmentality. Being traversed by various processes of “deterritorialization” the bunker lost its function as a locus of secured passage and transformed into a highly dynamic “empty space” that hides, till this day, residua for creativity and difference.

Der vorliegende Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Sinnes- und Emotionsgeschichte der atomaren Bedrohung im Kalten Krieg. Das Augenmerk der Literatur galt bislang visuellen Repräsentationen von Feuerbällen, Atompilzen und Ruinen von Städten, die staatlicherseits zur emotionalen Kontrolle der Bevölkerung instrumentalisiert wurden. Allzu schnell wird bei diesem Fokus auf zirkulierende Bilder der Bombe jedoch vergessen, dass das nukleare Zeitalter auch reale Bauten hervorgebracht hat, die nicht nur den Sehsinn, sondern das gesamte körperliche Sensorium der Menschen qua materiellem Schutz gegen Nuklearwaffen miteinbezog. Anhand wissenschaftlicher Studien zum Leben in Atomschutzräumen in der Schweiz zeigt der Beitrag, dass im „radikalen Zeitalter“ durchaus alle Sinne einem staatlichen Zugriff unterworfen waren. Übergeordnete Zielsetzung der in den 1960er- und 1970er-Jahren durchgeführten Laborstudien war es, die Denk- und Gefühlswelten der Schweizer durch die Modulierung der sensorischen Umweltstressoren im Bunker zu steuern. Emotionale und multisensorische Geographien waren im Kalten Krieg aufs engste miteinander verwoben. Der schweizerische Staat verschrieb sich einer sensory politics, die eine auf das Sehen ebenso wie die haptischen, olfaktorischen und akustischen Wahrnehmung zielende Regulierung der Sinne umfasste, um dozile Bürger und eine schweizerische „bomb-proof society“ herzustellen.
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Cette contribution traite de l’histoire des sens et des émotions dans le cadre de la menace nucléaire durant la Guerre Froide. Pour la plupart des gens, la menace de «la Bombe» qui structurait l’antagonisme systémique entre les blocs était très difficile à appréhender de manière sensorielle. La littérature à ce sujet se focalisait presque exclusivement sur des images et des films représentant des champignons atomiques, des boules de feu ou encore des villes en ruines, autant d’images qui étaient instrumentalisées de manière répétée par l’Etat à des fins de contrôle émotionnel des populations. Cette focalisation sur la dimension visuelle de la Bombe contribuait le plus souvent à faire oublier que le conflit Est­Ouest avait suscité la construction de structures dont le but était justement d’offrir une protection matérielle et sensorielle la plus large possible contre la bombe atomique: les fallout shelters ou bunkers anti-atomiques. En se basant sur des études scientifiques analysant les conditions de vie dans les bunkers en Suisse, cette contribution souligne que tous les sens étaient soumis durant la Guerre Froide au regard inquisiteur de l’Etat. En effet, les expériences de laboratoire menées durant les années 1960 et 1970 visaient principalement à orienter les univers sensoriels et cognitifs des Suissesses et des Suisses par le biais d’une modulation des expériences haptiques, olfactives et visuelles à l’intérieur des bunkers. L’Etat fédéral développait ainsi de véritables sensory politics dont le but était de produire des citoyen·ne·s dociles et, autant que possible, une bomb­proof society.

Paul Frosch (1860-1928) was a German bacteriologist and pioneer of animal virology. He worked at the Institute for Infectious Diseases in Berlin as close co-worker of Robert Koch, the leading figure of medical bacteriology, and became later appointed professor at the veterinary school in Berlin. Based on a study on typhoid, Frosch introduced the term ‘infection carrier’ for infected persons without manifest symptoms, and emphasized the role they played in spreading the epidemic. The concept subsequently became the cornerstone of epidemic control for a variety of infectious diseases in Germany. In 1898, Frosch pioneered virus research when he described the etiological agent of the foot-and-mouth disease together with Friedrich Loeffler, characterizing it as an ultravisible, filterable substance.