Date of Birth

As one decade swings gloomily into another, an eagle-eyed reader has drawn my attention to an irregularity regarding the founding date of my journal Underneath the Bunker. The information to the left of this post (‘About Georgy Riecke’) states that I have been general editor of the journal since 2003. And yet, elsewhere on the web (here, for instance) can be found claims that the journal was founded in the ‘mid 90s’. Which, comes the lusty cry, is right?

Both are misleading. The truth is that I can’t say exactly when the magazine was born, per se, though it is certainly true that it had a difficult conception. The idea emerged, without doubt, in the mid 90s, when I was still working on another journal (Peggy Grounter’s ill-fated Groping for Allusions). An early, draft copy was then produced somewhere around 1998, possibly under a different name (or then again possibly not: I can’t recall).  At this point, the project stalled for a while, before relaunching at the beginning of the decade as a fully-fledged printed journal, with a full team of employees – a situation that lasted, in all, about two weeks. In those days, of course, Underneath the Bunker had no online presence; this didn’t start until at least 2004, whereupon the printed version ran into troubles, finally dying in about 2005. At about the same time, many of the original team went their own ways, leaving me as master of the entire project, helped out by a gang of regular contributors, amongst them such names as Heidi Kohlenberg, Jinpes Terenk, Lucien Ropes and Caspar Nietcher (or Nietscher as he seems to be calling himself at present).

Since then, we have undergone further changes. As things stand, the journal is undergoing a rather long spring-clean, with the main bulk of the action being re-located to this very blog. Is it the end for Underneath the Bunker? In one form, yes. But as the old saying goes, you can’t keep a good journal of obscure European Literature down. Oh no you can’t.

To answer the original question, however – when was Underneath the Bunker founded? Well, I wonder whether it matters. It is, that is all I need to know. To ease the beating hearts of the truly pedantic amongst you, I shall nonetheless throw you a date. How’s about the 28th August 2002? Yes?

That’s settled then.

P.S. My Christmas Quiz (aka. ”Half-hearted Seasonal Quiz’) is still very much open for answers. It all kicks off here.