Lecture by Maren Röger (Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe)
In co-operation with the Modern History Research Seminar, University of Oxford
During the Cold War, millions of people on both sides of the Iron Curtain played board and digital games in living rooms, barracks, and schools. They played classics such as Memory in the FRG and Merk-Fix in the GDR, but also games with names like Fulda Gap and Class Struggle. In this lecture, I will present games—for a long time neglected by Cold War Studies—as a relevant part of popular culture in the 1970s and 1980s. First, I will show how they played a significant role in conveying to a popular audience the fundamental characteristics of the East-West conflict. Second, I will focus on GDR board games and analyse their territorial and ideological worlds and boundaries.
Maren Röger has been Director of the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe and Senior Professor of Central and Eastern European History at the University of Leipzig since 2021. Her numerous publications include monographs on the gender history of German-occupied Poland, the visual history of Habsburg Bucovina, and entangled memories of post-war expulsions, and articles on board and computer games in the Cold War.
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