Bulletin from Berlin: When you feel like there’s no stability in the presence, it’s hard to plan for the future

Opinion by

Cathrin Schaer

Europe correspondent·New Zealand Listener·

16 Apr, 2026 06:00 PM3 mins to read

Cathin Schaer is a freelance journalist living in Berlin

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Tumbledown: Wünsdorf’s WWII bunkers have renewed relevance. Photo / Getty Images

It’s usually pretty quiet out in Wünsdorf, an east German hamlet approximately 50km south of Berlin. The town has about 9200 residents but in late winter, you’d never know it. Aside from the occasional curtain-twitcher and odd dog walker, the locals stay indoors.

One thing you will see here
though are small, curious clusters of sightseers. Most of these wearers-of-sensible-walking-shoes have come to see the ruins of the “forbidden city” in the Brandenburg woods. For €14 (about NZ$28) you can get a tour of the place led by a taciturn, middle-aged volunteer from the local historical society.

The grumpy volunteer will take you into the woods, past moss- covered houses the Nazis built here secretly from 1937-39. The buildings have concrete walls but were made to look as though they were wooden. Their cement walls, now cratered or collapsed, are an impressive metre or so thick. The structures themselves were basically above-ground bunkers connected via underground tunnels. The German military planned the invasion of Poland from here.

Later the Russians took over this part of the country. That’s when Wünsdorf became “forbidden”. It was the headquarters of Soviet forces in Germany and home to 50,000 troops, the largest garrison outside Russia.

The Soviets turned the Nazi bunkers into nuclear shelters. Your guide will lead you to them, 14m underground. It’s not very nice: dark, dank, cold (about 10°C), the walls wet and dusty. One long, pale corridor is lined with dozens of rusty metal bunkbeds, thin mattresses long gone from this decidedly uncomfortable communal bedroom.

Two thoughts come: one, those bunks would have been horrendously creaky; and two, strange to think that only a generation ago, nuclear shelters were a normal phenomenon.

Growing up in New Zealand, there’s no way my generation thought too hard about bunkers or bombs. Looking back, we were lucky. Covid-19 was the first rupture that really made us feel our communal future might not be assured. Now look at us – running out of jet fuel, fearing Russia might attack Europe in, say, four years, and watching our former friends, the Americans, carelessly run down their own empire and alliances.

A February Eurobarometer survey for the European Union shows we are not alone. Of 27,000 Europeans surveyed, more than two-thirds – 68% – believe their country is under threat. In France, 80% of locals do and in Germany, 75% think this way.

In its annual security report, Germany’s Allensbach Institute found 72% of locals worry about an increasingly unpredictable world and 69% about their country getting directly involved in military conflicts.

A German colleague explains why all the uncertainty hits differently here. Her 84-year-old mother is worried because she fears another world war. She herself is worried because she grew up during the Cold War, and her daughters, who are in their 30s, increasingly question their plans for the future, including whether they should have children. “I can’t really fault them,” the editor, who’s in her early 60s, reasons. “After all, when you feel like there’s no stability in the present, it’s hard to plan for the future.”

Is that overstating things? Maybe. After all, life is going on pretty much as normal in Europe. Holidays are being planned, dentists’ appointments made and, unlike millions of others, we need not fear jets overhead or boots on the ground.

Yes, but. There’s just this uncomfortable feeling – the more anxious among us will call it dread or foreboding – that we are being dragged into a new era of injustice, where might is right, everybody lies, and bunkers have been made great again. l

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