SCIENCE FICTION HAS long served as a platform for exploring the limits of reality. The more disturbing one's experiences in real life, the more plausible it is to express one's confusion in writing. The atrocities of the Vietnam War and the growing drug culture in the 1960s certainly created a sense of “unreality”—with novels like Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 (1969) and pretty much the entire oeuvre of Philip K. Dick reflecting that generation's unease with the way trauma and doubts were swept under the carpet by a materialistic society. While the cultural revolution of the late 1960s in West Germany had run into the buffers of political reality and the young generation retreated into countercultural milieus and radical subgroups, the politically engaged intellectual elites continued to challenge the capitalist system and its increasing flexibility in absorbing protest and criticism. Their critique is cleverly delivered in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's made-for-television SF film Welt am Draht (World on a Wire, 1973), an adaptation of Daniel F. Galouye's novel Simulacron-3 (1964). Although it was unavailable for a long time, a digitally restored version was presented in 2010 at the sixtieth Berlinale (Berlin International Film Festival) and it was subsequently shown to an even broader audience at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

After his mentor Professor Vollmer, inventor of the Simulacron program, dies under mysterious circumstances, Fred Stiller becomes technical director of the Institut für Kybernetik und Zukunftsforschung (IKZ, Institute for Cybernetics and Futurology). Here, researchers are trying to model social behavior patterns and predict future trends as well as future demand for products and resources. Simulacron creates a simplified version of the real world, in which so-called “identity units” live within an artificial environment generated by the program. These identity units do not know that they are only artificial constructs, or that they can be deleted or reprogrammed at any time. The operators are able to transfer their consciousness into one of the identity units in order to enter this virtual reality.

Mysterious events cause Stiller to fear he is losing his mind. Staff members at the institute disappear, and nobody but him can remember them. During a car ride with Vollmer's daughter Eva, the view in front of him suddenly turns dark, as though the road ahead ends in nothingness.