Back

In May, 1999, I made a trip to Peenemünde, Germany. 

[Peenemünde was site of the Nazi research group which developed the V-1 and V-2 missiles, the Nazi's Manhattan Project and is a central place in Thomas Pynchon's novel, Gravity's Rainbow]

This is a section from my diary:

Wednesday, May 26. Axel and I rent a car, and four of us go to Peenemünde. We leave at 7:30 am, and drive for about four hours up north to the Baltic. The other two are Phillip von Hilgers, who has taken Bernhard Siegert's seminar on Gravity's Rainbow and written about the V-2 subsystems, and Antje Pfannkuchen, who escaped East Germany on her own, six months before the wall came down and who is now doing work in media history and also knows Gravity’s Rainbow quite well (only students, I notice, are able to take the weekdays off). Peter Berz, one of Kittler’s colleagues, has agreed to call ahead to somebody he knows there, to get the cook’s tour. We show up, and already the place seems to be more of a destination than I’d expect, with many cars and German tourists relieving boredom from their holidays on the coast. The museum itself looks a little skimpy, and we’re anticipating disappointment if this is all we get to see. We wait a while, and then meet with the director, whose assistant tells us you need to call ahead by several days to see the sites besides the museum, especially the famous Test Stand VII. The director tells us the same thing, "sorry but I just returned from a tour and can’t give another one because I’ve got an appointment at 2pm." Then Axel and Antje start telling him about underwater archaeology, and how we’re interested in looking into doing an underwater survey of the V-2 landing sites in the Baltic after the rockets were launched from Peenemünde (which is, indeed, true). He instantly becomes interested and calls a friend of his on the phone, and in five minutes we’ve got an appointment for the cook’s tour at 2pm. We show him sonar imagery from Turkey, and a very interesting conversation ensues. As is so common with museum directors, he’s got his own ambitions for the place, and by participating in those ambitions we receive great cooperation. 

A 2pm a man comes by and picks us up in a van. We drive to the airport, where we all have to sign a waiver form, indemnifying them from liability for chemical weapons, unexploded ordnance, etc. (At the airport I can’t help but thing of the photo of Himmler getting off a plane to visit Peenemünde. It was the only day Von Braun was known to have worn his SS uniform, and the only known picture is here a the airport but Von Braun is (intentionally?) hidden mostly behind Himmler. I think if there’d been a full frontal photo of Von Braun in an SS uniform, the American space program might have turned out rather different.) Then we drive to the other part of the island (and pass a very Pynchonian site: a colorful circus tent set up in the middle of the woods and abandoned. What for?). Visible in the pond on the right is the remains of a British Lancaster bomber. Railroad tracks appear next to the road. I learn that Peenemünde (Peene is the river, Peenemünde is the mouth of the river) had numerous innovative railway systems; some for cargo, special ones for fuel and rockets. They even modified some regular street railways from Berlin for the workers to go from their cottages to the secret laboratories; after the war the cars were removed to Moscow, where they didn’t fit the tracks so the Russians sent them back to Berlin, and a few of the cars still run in Berlin today. Albert Speer designed the layout here and oversaw the construction, and the place was a kind of Nazi science-utopia. The railroads evoke, of course, the other Nazi uses for railroads, and for a Jew that other technological system of the Third Reich is ever present, even in these sylvan woods. It strikes me as very German that they put such a place more in the woods than on the coast; it was once a nature preserve owned by Von Braun’s ancestors; his father used to hunt here (whereas the Americans put their secret science village, Los Alamos, in the desert and in the West, at a place owned by the Oppenheimer family). Gravity's Rainbow (501): Before you sight it, you can feel the place....It's a face. On the maps, it's a skull or a corroded face in profile, facing southwest: a small marshy lake for the eye-socket, nose-and-mouth cavity cutting in at the entrance to the Peene, just below the power station...

After a while we come to a locked gate with a forbidding sign. The driver gets out, unlocks it, and drives through, locking it behind us. The sense is forest, rather overgrown, with some barely-visible concrete roads. On the left is a clearing, and the driver opens a notebook and shows us a picture of the wind tunnel building. A beautiful, German modernist structure which housed the best wind tunnel (supersonic) in the world. The entire thing is now cleared away, and one can see only the bare remains of the foundation. The Russians took the tunnel and rebuilt it at home. I learn that the 1945 Potsdam agreement required the Russians to destroy Peenemünde entirely. So what we are seeing is both the damage from the Allied bombing raids in 1943 and the damage from the Russians in the spring of '45: 

Again, Gravity's Rainbow (501) Low, burned out buildings now, ash images of camouflage nets burned onto the concrete (they had only a minute to glow, like a burger's silk mantle -- to light this coastal indoors, this engineers' parlor full of stodgy shapes and neutral tones...) Charred helpless latticework: what was wooden now only settles, without strength. Green human shapes flash in the ruins. The scale is very confusing, along here...Smooth-lipped bomb and shell craters hold blue sea water. Barracks have had their roofs blown away: spinal and ribwise and sunwhite the bones of these creatures that must have held in their time half the Jonahs of falling Europe. But trees, beech and pine, have begun to grow in again where spaces were cleared and leveled for housing or offices -- up through cracks in the pavement, everywhere life may gain purchase, up rushes green summer '45, and the forests still growing dense on the upland. 

As we continue to drive along, we realize that what was formerly this ultra-high-technology research compound is now utterly gone. The ground is torn up by bomb craters, and by trenches the Russians have dug to remove all of the connecting cables. Even some unexploded bombs are visible. We can only follow what we are seeing with the map, (pictured above) and with the driver’s comments, which are excellent, detailed, and enthusiastic. After a while we stop in a clearing, and this is the entrance to the famous Test Stand VII, site of the V-2 test launchings, and a significant scene in Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon called it Test Stand VII "the Egg the flying rocket hatched from, navel of the 50-meter radio sky" (picture of model at right) because it is a broad, oval-shaped arena ringed by 15-meter high earthen ramparts, to contain the rocket blast and to keep the rockets themselves free of wind and dust. Outside the arena was an assembly building (red building in background of model picture at left) where the rockets were taken off trains and lifted to vertical. Here they were calibrated and tested and then moved out by a special rail platform . The building itself, once 35 meters high, is now just a pile of rubble (below left, Axel has his foot on the rail at the entrance). 

The entire place is heavily overgrown (not just weeds but significant sized trees in the middle of everything, it is after all 50 years), and very thick with mosquitoes. The rails are still visible for the platforms, as is a deep, concrete-lined trench (now filled with water) which brought the rockets to the entrance to the arena. Here they met another rail line which carried fuel (curious how much rocket technology depended on the techniques of railroads). Together, fuel and rocket went into a special stand, also on rails, where they were wheeled together into the center of the arena. Then the rocket was fueled, the engine actually fired for a short burst (at right, 'standing next to the trench over which the rocket was test fired; the trench is now full of water). The paths these stands took are still clear, as are the underground tunnels which allowed people to walk underneath the arena back to a bunker with a control room. From here the rocket was moved on its own to the center of the arena for firing. Now is just a flat space with some broken concrete (that's four of us on the spot below; we're not cold, just cowering from mosquitoes). The guide (right) tells us this spot is the birthplace of the space age, and when a few Soviet astronauts (including Yuri Gagarin) visited here they broke down in tears. Nearly three hundred rockets were test fired from this spot from 1942 to 1944 (one estimate says 285, another 314), although some were fired from the surrounding woods (Test Stand X) to test the procedures of launching the rockets from the field.

Holy-Center-Approaching is soon to be the number one Zonal pastime. Its balmy heyday is nearly on it. Soon more champions, adepts, magicians of all ranks and orders will be in the field than ever before in the history of the game. The sun will rule all enterprise, if it be honest and sporting. The Gauss curve will herniate toward the excellent...Slothrop has begun to thin, to scatter. "Personal density," Kurt Mondaugen in his Peenemünde office not too many steps from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear his name, "is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth." (508-9)

Next stop after Test Stand VII are the V-1 launch sites, which are much closer to the coast and right out in the open. We drive around the perimeter of the airport (for many years a GDR fighter base) and between large, eerie aircraft bunkers which date from the 70s and 80s, now all abandoned. On the edge of the island, in a large clearing, we come upon several different launch ramps. These were built to test different configurations of the launch apparatus for the V-1 (I'm kneeling on the top of one at right, the Baltic just at my back). While they are broken up, some even retain char marks on the concrete from the rocket engines as they lifted off. Striking how this "modern" technology leaves traces which are so archaeological (in the colloquial sense of the term). Stone and earth survive, most everything else disappears.

It’s getting late, so we drive back, thank our tour guide (learn that he was for many years a GDR pilot) and go to the museum. Its set next to the original power plant (Kraftwerke) for the research facility, a huge, ominous looking coal plant which was said to be the most modern in Europe when it was built in the late 1930s (it ran, supplying power to the town, until a few years ago). Rotting Soviet-made jet fighters with GDR markings are on display around the museum, as is a freshly-painted V-2 and a number of parts and remains of V-1s and V-2s. Inside, the museum is mostly text and pictures on the wall, which I’m not so interested in because you can get that from books. They do have a great many artifacts, however, ranging from gyros and electronic components from the rockets themselves to wind tunnel models, and these are quite interesting, given my interest in control technologies. They also have a nice mock-up of an engineer’s office, and a very well-done model of Test Stand VII which helps us understand the details of the place we just were (in the photo at left, note the trench beneath the gray test stand, the rocket vertical and ready to fire, and the 50-meter antenna). It reminds me of Knossos on Crete, where you go visit the site and then go straight to the museum to see the artifacts; who knew the "space age" would become archaeology so soon?

Take pictures for a while in front of the rockets, chat with the guides and souvenir-sellers, all of whom are very skilled technical people from the facility who lost their jobs when the wall came down. They are excited to put Peenemünde "back on the map" as a tourist destination for the birth of spaceflight -- as though the future history of the space age can remove some of the lingering stigma from these Nazi temples. What interests me is the reverse: Peenemünde is clearly a place of scientists' moral compromise (recall von Braun's comment "I'm just responsible for getting the rockets up, where they come down, that's not my department."). In its connection to the space age, this place points to the ambiguities which underlay the later history as well.  The town with the Wernher von Braun Civic Center at its core, after all, is not in Germany but in Alabama.  

We are quite tired and hungry, but get in the car and make one more stop to the liquid oxygen factory which we are told is a must see. Its not technically open, but a friend of ours has said you can jump through a hole in the fence. When we ask the museum director if they can show it to us, he says "It’s not technically open, but you can jump through a hole in the fence." So we go to this large, bombed-out shell of a building, and sure enough there’s a hole in the fence. Walking inside, we are greeted with this enormous, open space; old cables and steel lie about everywhere; it’s late in the afternoon so the sunlight is coming in at a shallow angle, and lights up the surrounding trees through the plentiful windows (above right). The sense is much like being in a Cathedral, even down to the high, central nave with windows at the top flanked by supporting spaces (the outer wings seem all but buttresses), and the seemingly-spiritual goal of building a factory to produce oxygen (I wish I knew more about how liquid oxygen is produced on industrial scales). Kittler’s interpretation, he told us last night, is that the purpose of this architecture for the Oxygen Factory is to be a Christian balance for Test Stand VII, whose layout is so clearly pagan and Teutonic. Standing there, its hard to argue with him.

We leave the factory, drive to a nearby coastal town and have dinner in a very East German feeling resort. Head back to Berlin and arrive at 1am, where we promptly head to a café and stay up late sitting by the river drinking beer and going over the day.

Back