Hochbunker Körnerstraße / bunker k101

The bunker was built on a plot next to the site of the Ehrenfeld Synagogue, which had been destroyed down to its outer walls during the November pogroms on the night of 10 November 1938. The adjoining garden plot was expropriated and forcibly auctioned in 1939 and, from December 1940, placed at the disposal of the Nazi "Führer emergency programme".

During the last two years of the war the bunker sheltered civilians from air raids – Ehrenfeld was targeted by Allied bombing 55 times. Residents held a bunker pass with an assigned place. Jews, Sinti and Roma, and forced labourers were barred from seeking shelter here. In 1944 the two Edelweiss Pirates Franz Rheinberger and Bartholomäus Schink met in this bunker, which thereafter served the group as one of its meeting points.

The first artistic use took place in 1981, when Daniel Spoerri staged the action "Promenade sentimentale" with his students. After years of campaigning by Ehrenfeld artists – in 2011 a project group collected around 2,000 signatures against an impending sale – the "Förderkreis Hochbunker Körnerstraße 101" association was founded in 2012 and now rents the building from the federal government. In 2013 it reopened to the public as bunker K101. Since then artists living in Ehrenfeld in particular have exhibited here, with a growing emphasis on electronic art. Each year on 10 November a silent march organised by the alliance "Ehrenfeld gegen Rechtsextremismus" sets off from the bunker to the memorial in Schönsteinstraße for the executed Edelweiss Pirates and forced labourers.