History Department Lecture: Cardboard Divisions and Iron Myths
Wargames and German-American Memory of World War II
Join the Department of History for a lecture by Jeremy Best, an award-winning historian of modern Germany at Iowa State University.
In 1958 Charles S. Roberts invented the modern tabletop wargame with his release of Tactics. Within a decade, his company, Avalon Hill, faced off against competitors who all fought for a voracious audience of young wargamers. One of the most important qualities a game could have to drive sales was its “authenticity.” Designers claimed for themselves the authority of historians, and they used the tools of historians to legitimate the games they created. Rulebooks included appendices and bibliographies, consumers and designers argued for the accuracy of the history depicted on the battlefield. In this quest for authority, game designers fell into a trap laid for them twenty-plus years before — the games they created about World War II presented the German Wehrmacht in that war as honorable, skilled, brave— but not criminal. By the 1970s, the so-called Myth of the Clean Wehrmacht found a new tool for exonerating German generals for war crimes and genocide. To date, the Myth remains core to much of computer and tabletop games about World War II.
In this talk, Professor Jeremy Best details the history of this process – how Americans participated in the dissemination of the Clean Wehrmacht Myth, how hobby wargamers integrated it into their games, how the Myth was re-exported to West Germany, and what the implications might be for gamers today.
Jeremy Best is an award-winning historian of modern Germany at Iowa State University. His research on the history of race, religion, and culture in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany has won multiple fellowships and awards. He is especially interested in the history of imagination; the construction of meaning by people and institutions in the past through fantasy, the articulation of those fantasies through cultural expression, and the transformation of that meaning into concrete policy behavior and goals.
Jeremy received a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park and joined Iowa State University’s faculty in 2015. His book, Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionary Culture in the Age of Empire (University of Toronto Press, 2021), is an analysis of the imagined world created by German Protestant missionaries, missionized Africans in the colony of German East Africa, and white Protestants in Germany. His work on the historian of the imagination has expanded with his newest project, “Blitzkrieg in the Basement: Wargames and Holocaust Aftermath in West Germany and the United States, 1945-1980.” In this book-length project, Best asks how German and American military planners and wargaming hobbyists imagined the recent past (World War II and the Holocaust) and conceived of the future (the Cold War) using military-themed, tabletop games.
In 2021, Heavenly Fatherland won the Best First Book Award from Phi Alpha Theta, the academic honor society for history. The International Bulletin of Mission Research also named it one of “Ten Outstanding Books in Mission Studies, Intercultural Theology, and World Christianity for 2021.” His research has been supported by the German-American Fulbright Commission, the Holocaust Educational Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, as well as Iowa State University. He has been a Research Fellow of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C.; an Andrew and Valentin Cosman Fellow at the Strong National Museum of Play; and a Curt C. and Else Silberman Faculty Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.