Wargames To Go 29 - Postwar Germany

This is a smaller, almost impromptu episode before I get to my next intended topic. During my last trip, the historic connection I was trying to make was to Charlemagne and his imperial capital at Aachen. That's still coming, both some games and a podcast episode. With that in mind, I'd specifically been trying not to get into more WW2 history while visiting Frankfurt, Cologne, and some places in-between. However, it still came up in the form of social history, the recent decades since 1945. I saw some sites about that, I read a book, saw a film, and wanted to share some thoughts on the podcast.

But what about a game? This time I wasn't thinking of traditional military history--I was learning more about socio-political history. Fortunately, since 2014 our hobby has had a perfect game for this topic, Wir sind das Volk. It's a game I appreciated and played a few times when it was new, but its latest incarnation on Rally The Troops has given me many more opportunities to play it. What a rewarding tie-in to my reading and travels.

  

Besides the game and its specific history, this general topic has me thinking about a political problem that has no easy, let alone perfect solution: how does a defeated opponent, perhaps a guilty nation in a tragic war, ever work its way back into good terms with other nations--its recent foes? To do so quickly & easily ignores the death & suffering that occurred. To extract a painful price over excessive time only contributes to danger of recurrence. Now I know a little of what happened after the World Wars, but what about the American Civil War and other conflicts. If & when I manage to visit Ireland, I believe this is a relevant issue there, too. Is it too challenging of a topic for "games" to handle? Perhaps. But it wasn't so long ago that no one had ideas about how to make a game about Postwar Germany, or the Suffragist Movement in America. Now look where we are! Designers can be more brilliant than we can imagine.

Films
• Judgment at Nuremberg
• Nuremberg
• Malta Story


Books
• Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany (Taylor)
• Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Judt)
• Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955 (Jähner)


Travel
While on a recent trip to Germany we saw two particular sites that made a strong impression on me, and I discussed in the podcast episode.
• Haus de Geschischte Bonn
• NS-Documentation Center (the EL-DE Haus), in Cologne/Köln

-Mark

Charlemagne will be still my next topic. I’m not sure how many games there are about him and this period, but it ties in to my trip to Aachen, I’d like to learn more, and want to take a break from WW2. Here’s a geeklist with my preliminary ideas about it.