Bunker!!!

I was biking around depressively and then I saw this guy come up out of a grate in the sidewalk, and next to the grate was a sign that said "theater in the bunker." They were putting on this one-woman play about Eva Braun. And it was in a bunker! So I went.

(You know, I liked the play, but I'd basically go to anything that was in a bunker. I'd go to like, girl scout craft fair if it was in a bunker. Or to a baby sitting contest or to watch Germany's Next Top Model.)

OMG it was way freaky! Way, way!

Was it the Führer bunker? No, no, that was demolished by East Germany to build apartment buildings as we know. This bunker is dramatically called "the deep bunker" though I didn't go in a deep part. It was built in 1937-1938 in preparation for the world war the Nazi regime was about to start, and it was only for workers in the Reich Agricultural Ministry and was kept secret from the general population. But then the Agricultural Ministry got bombed and they decided to let everybody in the bunker. (Well, everybody aryan and all that, it was Nazi Germany.) Then after the war etc. they forgot about the whole bunker till someone re-discovered it in the 1980s.

Woah, it was way scary in the bunker. The ceilings are not high. It's all concrete, some brick, everything painted white. The walls are about 3 feet thick, even between the rooms, and you're always very aware of the sharp right angles where the concrete walls meet the concrete floor, and there's no furniture or nothing. And man, I was like, not so thrilled to be surrounded by that much concrete, underground--at intermission everyone climbed the steps and stood on the sidewalk and it was a palpable relief to see the sky. Imagine if you couldn't leave the bunker 'cause the whole city was burning above your head. (There was this part in the play when Eva Braun was talking to Blondi the dog and she was was like, 'Blondi, above your dog head and my human head, the whole city is burning,' and I was like, 'holy shit!') This bunker is across the street from Anhalter Bahnhof, the current state of which gives some indication of what the bombing was like.

And of course the play ends with Braun's suicide in a bunker. Majorly creepy.

Oh, and the bunker is built literally on top of the subway tunnel, so whenever a train went by the whole place rumbled.

The bunker seemed to go on and on. I only walked through part of it. It held like 3,000 people. There is apparently a whole network of bunkers under central Berlin. There are also some doozies of above-ground bunkers so massive that they weren't worth destroying. Ones' now a rock climbing wall. Another one they just built an apartment building around and left it locked up.

Holy socks! Bunkers. So if you are feeling blue--bunkers! Woah. But they are creepy to the max, so be aware. (See, we were not supposed to take pictures inside but I totally snapped one, left.)