CHRISTIAN SCHWAGER'S FAKE CHALETS - ANNEKE BOKERN

unusual dwellings a home doesn't have to be a house
Under Cover
CHRISTIAN SCHWAGER’S FAKE CHALETS
Bunker spotting sounds like a hobby for someone who needs to get out more. However
photographer Christian Schwager has made uncovering Switzerland’s many disguised
bunkers the theme of his Fake Chalet project. Often masquerading as your typical
Swiss chalet, the illusion has had some people oblivious to their existence for years.
Text by Anneke Bokern
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unusual dwellings a home doesn't have to be a house
I almost missed my first fake chalet. Even though I had received military style instructions - take the motorway
from Basel to Zurich, leave it at exit Pratteln, follow the main road in the direction of Liestal, drive
up the steep driveway on the right behind the first roundabout - I only noticed that I had reached my
destination when I saw it disappearing out of the corner of my eye. A quick about turn and there it was,
perched on top of a hill, next to a farmhouse: a seemingly perfectly ordinary barn. In reality, though, it
was a bunker.
From far away, it had looked like a wooden stable with a brick base, a row of shuttered windows and a
pitched roof - nothing to hit the brakes for. Yet on closer inspection the deception became obvious. The
windowpanes didn’t reflect the sunlight, there was a huge, redundant white surface on one of the walls,
and the colour of the bricks and boards was fading. In fact, as soon as I knew what I was looking at, the
trompe l’œil effect evaporated.
If you don’t know it, however, you don’t see it. You only see what you want to see. And in Switzerland,
people usually want to see idyllic mountain-filled panoramas, dotted with pretty little chalets and rustic
barns. Who would have thought that Switzerland is cheating? Of course one might have guessed. It’s
just too picture perfect. I know how the protagonist of Swiss writer Max Frisch’s novel Stiller feels when
he says: ‘How should I explain what it is that makes me feel so uncomfortable when I see something of
this sort? It’s very tasteful, very clean, very serious; but only stage scenery.’ When he was serving in the
Swiss army in the 1940s, Frisch, originally an architect, was in charge of the construction of bunkers, so
he knew all about faking it.
OPEN SECRET
Of course, my first fake chalet isn’t the only one in Switzerland. ‘I don’t know exactly how many of
these chalet-bunkers there are, because it’s a military secret. But there must be at least 250,’ says
photographer Christian Schwager. With his Fake Chalets photo project, first published and exhibited
in 2004, he single-handedly turned the camouflaged bunkers into an open secret in Switzerland. ‘I’ve
seen about 200 of them myself. Only 107 ended up in the book, though. I didn’t take a photo if, for example,
the bunker was hidden behind trees.’ Many a Swiss resident only found out that there was a
bunker standing in the middle of their home village when they saw the exhibition of Schwager’s photos.
‘There were people who had been living next to a camouflaged bunker for 20 years and never realised
it,’ he says.
They probably never wanted to realise it, just like I’m not sure if I really wanted to know about the fake
chalets. From the moment my illusions were first shattered, my entire holidays in Switzerland were
marked by fervent distrust. I thought I saw fakes on every hill and in every village. Wherever Switzerland
looked the most Swiss, I became suspicious. ‘If you see a shifted pattern of manhole covers on the
road, you can be quite sure that in fact they’re a tank trap and there’s a bunker standing somewhere behind
them,’ Schwager had told me, and turned my holidays into a paranoid scavenger hunt.
The reason why the bunkers are so difficult to identify isn’t only the fact that they’re disguised with skill,
but also that their disguises vary. Their camouflage is carefully adapted to regional architectural styles.
Most of the examples photographed by Schwager are from the 1930s and 40s. ‘At that time, aerial reconnaissance
and espionage became an issue. That’s probably why the army decided to camouflage its
bunkers, which until then were concrete buildings with flat roofs just like everywhere else. But another
theory says that tourism was becoming important at the time, and the bunkers were dressed as chalets
in order not to disfigure the landscape.’ Maybe both versions are true and the Swiss army simply killed
two birds with one stone.
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Fascinated by his discovery, he did some research, found out that there were more examples in
Switzerland, and decided to turn them into a photographic project. In autumn of 2001, he started to call
his way through the many bureaucratic divisions of the Swiss army, trying to find out more about these
wolves in sheep’s clothing. ‘The lower ranks simply refused to tell me anything. In the end, a high-rankunusual
dwellings a home doesn't have to be a house
ing official gave me the tip to approach a military historian by the name of Oswald Schwitter, who turned
out to be very helpful and told me where to find most of the other fake chalets.’
Since his photo tour through fake Switzerland, Schwager has become a big fan of chalet-bunkers. No
wonder: It’s so much fun to find one. When I came across my second fake chalet, this time by chance,
I felt like I had discovered a secret that all the other passers-by knew nothing about. Very proud of myself,
I sneaked around a strangely shaped chalet on a mountain pass, inspecting a bulge under a painted
window and some wooden panelling that barely disguised the bunker’s embrasures. I felt very clever. At
any rate cleverer than the councillor from Lucerne who - according to an article in a regional newspaper
- once wanted to buy a chalet in Western Switzerland because it had such a great view, only to find out
that it was a bunker.
PERFECT IMITATIONS
Theatre painters were in charge of the paint jobs, supplying each bunker with a customised skin inspired
by the local chalet style. As the results prove, they went about their job with Swiss precision - although
the bunkers only had to deceive at a minimum distance of 20 metres. They painted realistic window
shutters, created perfect imitations of wood grain, and even took the position of the sun into consideration.
‘The level of detail is astounding,’ Schwager says with a smile. And the Swiss reputation for correctness
is up held, often only the strange shape of the building gives away its actual function. Schwager
encountered his first fake chalet when walking in the mountains in the summer of 2000. ‘I passed a chalet
which somehow looked impossibly narrow. I had to come to a distance of 2 metres until I understood
that it was a fake and actually a bunker.’
CALENDAR PHOTOS
Schwager, however, aims for more than just the thrill of discovery: He wants to save the fake chalets
from decay and demolition. ‘The publicly known ones aren’t in use anymore, so the army has no interest
in maintaining them, and the monument commissions also don’t feel responsible. But to my mind,
they’re works of art - also because the chalets are often enhancements of regional building styles. The
army created prototypes of something that never existed. They’re very surreal and very Swiss at the
same time.’ And didn’t we always know that there must be some dark secret hidden under the picturesque
surface of Switzerland?
When taking the pictures, Schwager attempted to add an extra layer to the surrealism and create calendar
photos with a twist. ‘That’s why the sky is always blue. I’m not a documentary photographer in the
style of the Bechers, but I wanted to avert the attention from the buildings. The most difficult part was to
determine the level of detail. Sometimes there’s ivy growing over a mock windowpane, which of course
immediately destroys the illusion. Should you show that or not?’ While the title of the book is very explicit,
Schwager would love it to deceive buyers just like the bunkers deceive the people passing them.
‘What would please me most is if Japanese tourists bought the book and took it home, thinking that
they’ve purchased a book about traditional Swiss chalet architecture.’ The art of deception?
www.christianschwager.ch
Fake Chalets by Christian Schwager, Edition Patrick Frey, 2004
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