‘Tanks, terrain and black horses’: The Intra-German border, Mitteldeutschland and Third World War cultural texts

Abstract

This article offers an insight into wargames of the Cold War as an escalation of lived experience. Utilizing the work of Bakhtin, Baudrillard and Williams, it insists that everyday life merges with simulations in order to produce chronotopic cultural texts that can be understood as dangerous illusions of virtual war. Adopting a case study approach, this article discusses the spatial aspects of Fulda Gap: The First Battle of the Next War, and how this wargame’s hexagonal spaces map onto the terrain that the gameboard represents — the so-called Fulda Gap — an area of weakness in NATO’s defence of the Intra-German border. As such, this article asserts that Fulda Gap acts as a trace of the border which is now deemed lost, and promotes an understanding of the border’s landscapes as a version of Mitteldeutschland (Middle Germany).