ABSTRACT
Introduction In the spring of 1945 Londoners and Berliners alike emerged from beneath the ground to face the consequences of World War II (WWII). They surfaced from a host of subterranean spaces including air-raid shelters, bunkers and underground railways. But while the first two of these spaces are widely acknowledged to be physical reminders of the conflict, the latter are less regularly considered as former landscapes of war and are rarely analysed with respect to the wartime memories and myths that they reference (or fail to reference) through commemorative and heritage practices. This chapter remedies this situation by approaching the London Underground (Underground) and the Berlin Untergrundbahn (U-Bahn) and Stadtschnellbahn (S-Bahn) as former landscapes of war. It demonstrates how these landscapes witnessed and continue to play host to an array of WWII civilian experiences, memories and myths, which have repeatedly demanded public negotiation, been produced across and between material, representational and experiential strata, and are influenced by the interplay of a range of mnemonic actors, processes and structures. It charts these subterranean railways’ WWII histories and characteristics before highlighting the dominant cultural tropes and mnemonic discourses that shape the remembrance and ‘heritagisation’ of subterranean experiences of civilians in wartime. Two cases illustrate the extent to which these experiences are commemorated and memorialised within the networks’ landscapes today. In Berlin, the commemorative absences and myths relating to the deliberate flooding of the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn at the end of the Battle of Berlin is considered, before attention is shifted to London and the earlier Bethnal Green Tube shelter disaster of March 1943. From here it is suggested that each case’s public negotiation can usefully inform the other in ways that highlight the potential for these landscapes to provide unique contexts in which to address the sensitive and often controversial subject of commemorating WWII civilian suffering.
