Down, down, down, into the Berliner Unterwelt! Photo (cc) flickr user escpeapalumni

The meeting place was normal enough; if I hadn’t known what was going on beneath us and where we would spend the next hour and a half, I never would have guessed at what was just below the ground on which I stood.  Berlin’s Gesundbrunnen metro stop, both inside and outside, lacked the kind of dank, enthralling mystery that was waiting several stories beneath us in the Berliner Unterwelten.

My fascination with tunnels goes back a long time.  After reading a science fiction book called Neverwhere and a nonfiction book called The Mole People, I began searching out information, both nonfiction and otherwise, regarding tunnels of all kinds and, most importantly, the worlds they contained.  As journalists had learned, there had been a shanty town in the metro stations of New York.  As Hollywood would have it unused subway tunnels were always populated by psychotic mutants, werewolves, and deranged runaways.  And as legend had it there was an albino crocodile living in the London metro tunnels.  Fictional and real, there was a world going on underground, whether it be the lives of the water pipes that fed my faucet and the sewer canals that carried it away again, the tunnels run with subway car tracks, or empty bomb shelters, abandoned once the threat of war subsided.

I wasn’t the only one whose imagination went wild at the very thought, and if fiction writers, journalists, and Hollywood hadn’t already proved that, then the line for a ticket for one of the Berliner Unterwelten tours certainly did.  After a ten minute wait, we gratefully bought the last two tickets (9 Euros a pop) just before the woman behind the counter hung up a sign reading “sold out.”  Tickets clutched in eager hands, we the scuttled off to another unassuming location across the street where we would be led down concrete stairs and into the labyrinth of some of Berlin’s many remaining underground bunkers.

"Doors to the gas lock and shelter should first be closed when bombing becomes audible." Photo (cc) flickr user therealneurox

If I had had more time, I would have gone on every one of the seven tours the Berliner Unterwelten Society offers.  But with only a few days time, we had chosen “Tour C-The Classic Tour” that would give us an overview of what underground Berlin has to offer.  When our turn finally came, our group filed into a “reactivated” Cold War bunker through heavy metal doors, and into a small room used to generate the bunker’s power.

The irony, it seemed, was that the bunker’s power supply came from the city grid.  This power supply ran the bunker’s light, water, and ventilation systems.  So what happened when the bombing people were in the bunker to escape knocked out the city’s power?  Well, two people could turn a large crank to keep it going.  Our tour guide selected two members of the group to try it out, and then she turned out the lights.

With considerable effort, they managed to turn the lights back on, but both were breathing heavily afterward.  And how long could someone in peak physical condition turn the crank?  They had done studies, our tour guide told us, and the answer had been fifteen minutes.  I thanked my lucky stars that I had not been born into a time of war as we shuffled through maze-like hallways hung with portraits of those, I assumed, who had spent time here.

After several stops for short speeches from the tour guide about how many people could have fit into various rooms, and how uncomfortable all of them would have been at maximum occupancy, we came out a door and found ourselves in the middle of a subway station.  “So this is where those unmarked doors in the metro lead…” I thought excitedly to myself.

A tour guide shows visitors the former bunker's bathroom. Photo (cc) flickr user escpeapalumni

We walked through the station, past people waiting idly for the next U-Bahn, and into a bunker preserved from World War II and the home of the Berlin Underworlds Museum.  We saw rooms with light-sensitive paint that would glow for up to 45 minutes after a power outage, we saw cots and rooms where people in the bunker could store their luggage, and we saw the old toilets–most of which were now gone as after the war people had stolen anything they could burn in order to heat their houses.  In the last room of the museum we stood in front of a reproduction subway car, and then, introspectively, we climbed blinking back up into the light above.

Your underground Berlin

Our tour was organized by Berliner Unterwelten e.V.  Most tours cost 9 Euros per person and last an hour and a half.

The local public transportation company BVG offers open-topped subway car tours of the city Friday evenings for 40 Euros per person.  The tours are very popular, however, and it is advisable to book six months or more in advance.