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Paper short abstract:

What is entailed in normalizing the diffusion of bombs still surfacing 77 years after WWII? Focusing on data from a German city, the bracketed time of war is contrasted with the timeless labor of devising practices to protect civil society from the potent materiality of weapons of war.

Paper long abstract:

Speaking about his exhibit “History of Bombs” at the Imperial War Museum in 2020, Ai Weiwei assessed “the horrible ingenuity of the weapons we innovate to kill each other.” This paper focuses on the kinds of ingenuity required to confront such weapons when they failed to ignite, explode, destroy, and kill. World War Two ended in 1945, yet some of its most dangerous detritus endures, present if generally hidden in the form of unexploded ordnances. They surface regularly if unpredictably when new building construction or street and sewage repair are undertaken. The presentation examines the processes of normalizing the extraordinary, drawing on ethnography and historical records of a German university town. As in many other German cities. WWII bombs are being discovered underground and generate a complex set of institutional as well as private practices to normalize and integrate what is a clear and present danger into the flow of everyday life. The paper traces the difference between the “horrible” but often celebrated ingenuity of weapon development and the painstaking logistics and skills entailed in diffusing threats that were intended to destroy livelihoods of the past. It probes the visibility of framed time – the beginning and end of wars – and the invisibility and normalcy of uninterrupted, continuous ever more ingenious weapons’ production and the struggles of civil society to foresee or else mend the impact of slumbering danger.