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Cryptic Concrete explores bunkered sites in Cold War Germany in order to understand the inner workings of the Cold War state. * A scholarly work that suggests a reassessment of the history of geo- and bio-politics * Attempts to understand the material architecture that was designed to protect and take life in nuclear war * Zooms in on two types of structures - the nuclear bunker and the atomic missile silo * Analyzes a broad range of sources through the lens of critical theory and argues for an appreciation of the two subterranean structures' complementary nature

This article engages the platform of critical geopolitics through conceptual clarification of the debates around chronopolitics (the politics of time). It argues that the current literature has either reduced it to the dynamic of ‘speed’ or the ‘modern’ time consciousness in geopolitics. After re-emphasizing a narrative understanding of temporality and a non-dichotomous conception of space and time, the article highlights the heterotemporality of geopolitical discourse. It suggests that chronopolitics should be understood not as an alternative to geopolitics but as one of its crucial elements – and one that can also be found in the project of a critical geopolitics.

In recent years, the Anglo-American media landscape has pondered over an old problem: that of German hegemony in Europe. At the heart of this debate lies the question of geopolitics. Is Germany, deliberately or by accident, a regional hegemon, and do its political elites seek to reorganize Berlin’s neighbours into a pan-European architecture that prioritizes Germany’s national interest? This question is not as straightforward as it may sound, not least because geopolitical thought was long a taboo in Germany, due to its influence on the formulation of National Socialist ideology in the 1920s. This article thus seeks to answer this question by focusing not on the often sanitized statements of political leaders but on the ideas of think-tankers, journalists, political advisers and public intellectuals, many of whom have had a significant influence on the formulation of German foreign policy. The article argues that, while geopolitical ideas were long confined to the right-wing margins of the political spectrum, they are now much more prevalent in the political mainstream. As Germany’s relations with the United States and Russia have gradually soured, this new German geopolitics has once again become preoccupied by the notion of Germany as a central power.

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine plunged Germany's Ostpolitik (Eastern Policy) into crisis. Whereas Ostpolitik had commonly been seen to have brought about system change in the Soviet Bloc, it now appeared as the root of Germany's doomed approach towards Putin's Russia. This essay examines the vision that drove Ostpolitik's architect Egon Bahr, a man who continued to guide social democrat security policy as a party grandee and elder statesman until his death in 2015. I spotlight Bahr's close personal and political relationship with the American statesman and geopolitician Henry Kissinger, an affiliation from which Bahr drew much legitimacy. Drawing on an analysis of Bahr's published works and press interviews, documents from his personal estate, and interviews with contemporaries of his, I show that his most lasting achievement was to anchor a neo-Bismarckian brand of realism within social democrat security policy. These findings shed light not only on the evolution of social democratic thought and the idiosyncratic nature of German geopolitics but also on an unexpected intersection of political realism and the peace movement.

The American geographer Ellen Churchill Semple (1863–1932), famous for her work on environmental influence, is often framed as a mere disciple of the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904). Drawing on a reading of Semple's published and unpublished works as well as correspondence and diaries, this paper sheds new light on the two anthropogeographers' intellectual relationship, which was in fact one with benefits to both sides. Semple found in Ratzel's geography a detached and scientific language with which to reinterpret American history. He drew on her as an informant on issues of racial segregation in the United States. Although Semple remained loyal to his broader intellectual project after his death, she had begun, soon after they met, to develop her own brand of anthropogeography, freed from the ambivalences of his work. Her sharpened reformulation, which he had endorsed, would ultimately make anthropogeography an easier target for its critics.

This article investigates Fallex 66, the first of a string of NATO war games that the West German government played in its command bunker between 1966 and 1989. During this exercise, the Bonn Republic simulated nuclear strikes on its 'own' targets and the resupply of NATO forces after a nuclear war on German territory. While in line with West German deterrence at the time, Fallex was read in East Berlin as an excessive game of playful self-annihilation in ways that invite a psychoanalytic interpretation. This article explores Fallex 66 not simply as an enactment of Cold War deterrence, but a Freudian 'fort-da' game, a traumatic re-enactment that was tellingly set in the subterranean space of a German bunker. West Germany's compulsion to self-abandon, I suggest, has important implications for how we understand the nature of geopolitical games.

Recent calls for regional expertise in the aftermath of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution have once again exposed the dependence of area studies on claims to geopolitical relevance. Whilst reinforced by the research impact agenda, this reflex is inherent in the very practice of naming and making areas. Attempts to transcend this conscription to geopolitics would contribute to the delegitimisation of the very areas on which an interdisciplinary area study depends, and herald the latter's gradual dissolution into the disciplines. Drawing on a discussion of current trends in Anglophone East European Studies, this commentary reflects on the broader relationship between human geography and area studies.

The discourse on EU-Russia relations amongst practitioners, think-tank experts, journalists and academics has congealed around a postmodern-modern binary. It is frequently argued that whereas Russia is caught up in a 'modern' framework of fixed territory, national identity and traditional geopolitics, the European Union is driven by a 'postmodern' spatial mindset that transcends these 'backward' values. This article argues that the EU's supposed postmodern geopolitics remains enmeshed in a very modern temporality-a consciousness of time that valorises the present over the past. It also detects a problematic disillusion with the postmodern and questions its implicit normativity.

Recent calls for regional expertise in the aftermath of the 2014 U krainian revolution have once again exposed the dependence of area studies on claims to geopolitical relevance. Whilst reinforced by the research impact agenda, this reflex is inherent in the very practice of naming and making areas. Attempts to transcend this conscription to geopolitics would contribute to the delegitimisation of the very areas on which an interdisciplinary area study depends, and herald the latter's gradual dissolution into the disciplines. Drawing on a discussion of current trends in A nglophone E ast E uropean S tudies, this commentary reflects on the broader relationship between human geography and area studies.

This article is prompted by recent calls for a 'Marxist geopolitics'. By exploring the case of contemporary Belarus, it argues that a Marxist geopolitics already (or rather still) exists in the world beyond the academic ivory tower. A dissection of foreign political discourse surrounding President Alexander Lukashenka over the last decade exposes two narratives that draw extensively from the repertoire of Soviet geopolitics. Whilst the first Marxist–Leninist storyline revives the early USSR's geopolitical position as a young state in the midst of a dystopian Western capitalism, the second one is familiar from the dying days of the Soviet empire and tells the story of a state that lies at the centre of a Utopian common European house. The conclusion assesses the neo-Marxist concept of the 'anti-geopolitical', but finds it to have difficulties in accounting for the struggle of the Belarusian opposition.