Angry Planet - When German Housewives Stood Up To Hitler

Episode Date: June 7, 2018

Berlin in 1943. Hitler has all but conquered Europe and millions of Jews have already died in the Holocaust. In the midst of this, a group of women gathered on Rose Street to demand action. They had lost their brothers, fathers, and husbands and wanted to know what had happened to them. They wanted them back and the protested for answers. It worked.This week on War College, Carnegie Mellon University professor Jessica Hammer and Moira Turkington of War Birds Games takes us through the Rosenstrasse protest and the emotional new game they’ve based on it.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollege.co. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. And we think of the Nazis as this ultimate evil that couldn't be challenged, and this game challenges that idea. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt.

and Jason Fields. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. Berlin, 1943. Hitler has all but conquered Europe, but struggles in Russia. Millions of Jews have already been murdered in the Holocaust. In the midst of this, a protest occurred in Berlin. It was led by Aryan, quote unquote,

women against the deportation of their Jewish husbands and relatives. It was the only public German protest against the deportation of the Jews. Jessica Hammer and Moira Turkington are here to talk to us about that protest and the game they've designed based upon it. It's called Rosenstraza. Hammer is an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and Turkington is the leader of Warbirds, a woman's game design collective. Jessica and Moira, thank you both so much for joining us. Glad to be here. Thanks for inviting us. Moira, can you tell us a little bit about Warbirds games?

So they're what I would call chamber games. They're small, generally intimate games for three to five, sometimes a little more players, that are dealing with women fighting on the front lines of history. They are small games that are played mostly live. So you have a character, you go through a situation. They're played out in somewhere between two and five hours, depending on the game itself. And they're usually quite emotionally immersive. You take on the guise of a character. you act as them or speak as them.

They are all made by a very diverse international collective of female designers. That is a base that is kind of always growing. And this is kind of the latest game that will be released in the series. Well, let's get some historical context first. What was this protest? What was it called? What was it all about? Well, it wasn't really called anything.

It was a vastly unorganized protest that where women just started showing up at the facility where their husbands had been taken. These were the last men that had been rounded up late in February, 1943. And women just gathered around the building asking questions, trying to find out where their husbands had been taken. And over the course of almost two weeks, more and more started coming until there were about 12 to 1,400 people who were showing up to demand the release of their husbands. What was it about this particular moment that caused you guys to focus on it? I mean, the persecution of Jews started when Hitler came to power in 1933,

and there were the Nuremberg Laws in 35. What was it about this moment that was so striking? So the game that we designed actually covers the period from 1933 to 1943. Because what makes these protests so powerful to us is that they came after a long period of, you know, first the reduction, the elimination of civil rights, persecution, mass murder, and finally genocide. And one of the things that was really interesting to us is when do people say no more, even at risk to themselves? I mean, for all they knew, these women were facing, would be facing deportation or death themselves for asking where their husbands would be taken. So for us, the Rosenstraza protests were interesting, both as the place where these women said no more, but also we explore in the game the questions of, well, why do you wait? why do people wait until it's their husbands and their families on the line?

And we think there's some real moral ambiguity in that question. And that's one of the things that we hope that players will discuss after the game. And we often find them discussing in their debriefs. Right, because this is actually when the women are protesting, it's actually a self-interested protests. I mean, they're not protesting on behalf of Jews. They're protesting on behalf of their husbands, right? That's right, which is both heroic and also raises the question of, is it right to only protest when it's your husband,

or should you be protesting when it's other people's husbands? Well, so maybe you could take us through a little bit of the game itself. The game begins in 1933. In fact, we have a prelude that happens prior to 1933 with these three couples and this brother and sister pair to get a glimpse into the happy times before the war. and before the mowing crush of civil liberties. The three couples, we see the moment that they came together to be couples,

a young couple in love, an intellectual couple talking about their books, a couple, a very conventional couple meeting at a faith social. And we see the brother and sister as they, come out of their last morning session for their father that has died. And we see them being who they are together and how they connect together and we build their relationships. And then over the course of the game, there are these very short scenes that happen where a facilitator will give the players who are playing those characters a background, a this has just happened.

Now you as a couple talk in the guise of those characters to let's see how they react and respond to the things that are happening in their world. So over the course of the game, there are sort of three acts, right? So each act contains a bunch of these scenes where the players will actually roleplay out

or describe their reactions to these scenarios. Act one is really sort of the closing of the jaws, right? So civil liberties are being reduced or removed. The characters are starting to feel a sense of oppression and danger, but there's also still a lot of very ordinary things happening, people moving into a new home, trying to have a child deciding what to do about, you know,

family and life decisions. And that takes the characters from 1933 to 1937. Act 2 takes them through to 1942, and we really begin to feel the sort of fear and oppression of both the sort of daily conditions these families we're living under, and also the fear of like where have our friends and extended families been deported to for these Jewish men? You know, you're dealing with things like the characters not being allowed into bomb shelters and having to, because they're considered a Jewish family, or needing treatment and having to decide between registering as a Jewish family and with all of the risks that entails in order to get access to medical care.

So, you know, really trying to point the characters at these very painful and often personal situations. And then the third act of the game is actually set during the protests themselves. We really slow down. And the last third of the game is over the course of a couple of weeks or days or weeks. or days or weeks, depending on exactly how it plays out, where the first two acts are really focused on the scale of years. And at that point, the players are sort of so relieved to be able to do something that we find them really connecting to this idea of like, oh, God, finally we can resist.

It's a very sort of like personal and cathartic experience when they take on the role of the women protesters. But it's important to note that we also ask them to take on the role of both the wives and the husbands. So every player in this role-playing game takes the role of another player's wife or sister, and then a different player's brother or husband. So at the same time that they're getting this sort of cathartic release of like, oh, my God, things have been so bad, we can finally do something. there's also this fear for themselves, to their own characters who are imprisoned and under threat of death

and for the characters that they are married to, for their spouse, the male characters that their female characters are married to. So it's sort of both for the self and the other. And this dual role is one of the really important things about the game that we really wanted to center both the voices of women, but also the voices of Jews. and in this case that meant having those

be two characters that everybody takes on both roles. Can we talk about the historical research y'all did a little bit? Are these characters that the players are inhabiting? Are they based on real people and real stories?

So they're certainly inspired by real people and real stories. We read as much firsthand material as possible to really get an understanding of, I mean, we read all the facts and figures to the 200 or more restrictions that were placed on Jewish families. We had to go into all the law stuff about what qualified a family to be privileged or not.

But when we're writing it, the most important piece was to really understand the lived experience of people. But they don't aim to represent any particular person, obviously. They're inspired by them and by many of the crises that we read about them facing. So they face similar challenges, but also because we're not telling their stories, the players themselves have a say in what happens in their lives, about what are the choices they make and about how much risk they're putting themselves in on a regular basis when they face these dilemmas that pop up in front of them. So can you give an example more of a choice that people might have? So just alluded to one earlier, which is there's a family in the game that is, the brother and the sister are both married. They're both Jewish and they're both married to non-Jewish Germans. And she is privileged and considered a German under the law because her husband's Jewish.

And so they're sorry, her husband is German. So therefore their family is safe. whereas he is also married to a German Christian, but he's not safe because the German or Jewishness of a household was determined by the man in it. The man and his wife have had a child, and that child has come prematurely and is needing urgent medical care. And that child cannot be brought to a German institution because they'll be rejected because they don't serve Jewish people who at this point in the war are no longer citizens. They can go to a Jewish hospital, but they would have to register to be served at the Jewish hospital, which means they would be put on the grand registry. and we are already advanced well enough into the early 40s where they know that registration may not may be a very dangerous option.

So they have to make decisions about whether or not they're going to do that or who's going to take care of the child or if, for example, the sister might take the baby and pretend it's her own and put herself and her family at risk in order to do it. So there are these very hard choices. And those are the big dramatic ones, but there's a lot of, of soft very human normal choices that come in terrible circumstances as well. A very romantic couple who are sorting through their possessions when they are forced to move under the Retail Relations Act, for example, the rental relations act, I should say.

And so them going through their memories and sorting through the things they want to take with them and the things they have to leave behind because they won't have enough space to go. They're all a long series of slow, hard decisions to be made and connections to be made between the couples, before the men get taken. So why design this game? I hate to say it. It doesn't sound like that much fun to play. Well, I don't think you design a game about the Holocaust to have fun. I think you design the game or you play a game about the Holocaust to learn something.

And I think that's our main component. And at the beginning of the interview, we talked about how these women stood up and it was the only protest. And it's also a story that was buried for a very long time. And we have this conception, especially modern, when we look back in time, we always look back and kind of iconify the war. And we know who the victors were and we know who the bad guys were. And we think of the Nazis as this ultimate evil that couldn't be challenged, and this game challenges that idea. When we found it, we were surprised and had never heard about it. And we wanted other people to know about it.

And more than anything, we wanted other people to really understand what it was like in that decade of time and that decade of total fear for these families. And also to give them a chance to practice stepping up and saying no, even when the odds are the, Third Reich, when the threat is the Third Reich, when you don't know what's going to happen, maybe to inspire people to act sooner and earlier to show that it's not one event. The Holocaust didn't happen today. It happened over a slow 10-year period, and it was only at the end we stood up, and look, it was successful at the end. So maybe we could stand up earlier.

I think it's also important to note that while you're right that this game is not necessarily fun in certain ways that we understand fun and we wouldn't want it to be. When we talk to players or facilitate this game for players or observe players playing this game, they actually have very meaningful and important experiences. This is not a game that you grit your teeth and play, you know, because it's good for you. That, you know, we've now had well over 100 people play this game. and it's the word that I would use is transformational for a lot of people, that it's a way of experiencing another time, another place, another self,

and working through very difficult concepts, which can be quite profound and satisfying in its own right. and I think that when we use the word fun, you know, as a game researcher, one of the things I actually do in my classes, my students are not allowed to use the word fun because they need to be more precise. There are many different kinds of fun and many different kinds of positive experiences that people can have in games. And so even though the story is a hard one and the choices that these characters are making are impossible, and players describe being profoundly moved and enraged and drawn to activism in the ways that we really hope they would.

We also have people coming back saying, when can I play this again? When can I have this experience a second time? Because it's meaningful and moving and important. So, you know, it's not a light comedy, but it's a power. experience that I think would be difficult to accomplish outside of the context of a game. One of the places that I always go and point to is other forms of media. We don't expect every movie that we watch to be fun, even if we're sitting in a theater with our friends. We expect some of the movies that we watch to be deeply moving, transformational, hard to deal with exploratory.

We expect some of the books we read. Oh, right. Exactly, yeah. That's right. So why should an art from our media type like games be any different? I think that's terrific. I just think, yeah, no, thank you for explaining that. Can we talk about the end game, literally the end phase of the Rose de Strassie game?

What was the aftermath of these protests? How is it depicted in the game? what happened to these women and these families? Historically speaking, these protests were successful in that the men who had been imprisoned were released. Some of them had actually already been sent on to Auschwitz and the ones who were still alive, they actually went, they came back from Auschwitz and were held in camps outside Berlin for the remainder of the war. So some of the families were immediately reunited, others were reunited after the war. And we represent that in the game, actually not by what happens to the women. The female characters protest, they sort of survive, the experience of protesting.

But the male characters are going into that end game with varying levels of vulnerability, depending on the choices that they and their families have made throughout the game. And they can have very different endings, which obviously affects their partners. So some characters may never be imprisoned. Some characters may be imprisoned but released, sent to Auschwitz and returned, and some characters may never return, again, depending on the choices that they've made throughout the game. And these are a range of outcomes that reflect sort of the historical reality of the range of outcomes for the men who were imprisoned.

Any thoughts about why the Nazis reacted the way they did to these protests, why it was that they, I don't know if you'd say showed mercy, but I mean, they reacted instead of imprisoning the women too. There's a lot of research that says that, in fact, the right. and Hitler specifically was afraid of the turning of the tide of women. In World War I, women in Germany had gone on a strike to demand an end to the war and have their sons come home. And it did come at a pretty critical time. And things had been very hard for a very long time. And women were very much seen as the social structure of Germany at the time.

They were in their very big folk movement. about returning to this ideal German cultural history that was part of the movement of the Reich. And the support of women and the unit of the family were really big and important in the minds of German people. The idea of tearing apart families and the idea of that there is not so much separation between us and them is with something that needed to be kind of kept quiet and maintained. There is some documentation, not a lot because I think a lot of it was actually destroyed, that says they were hesitant to remove them. They did shoot at them and threaten them with guns.

They did tell them to leave, but the women refused. And in the end, they chose to send the husband's home to quiet down the situation so that it couldn't gain any more traction. How many of your players had heard of this before? None, as far as I know. I believe one in the groups that I've been running. We've had one out of well over 100. And in it, we've had several, you know, scholars of wartime and several soldiers of Jewish

history. We had one in our very early playtests who was certain by the end of the game that it was all going to end in disaster. and I remember him blinking and all of a sudden realizing that this was going to work and not being sure if we had made fiction of it. We had a great fruitful conversation afterwards. You got to tell us a little bit about that conversation. Go ahead, Mo.

Well, it was a gentleman who has playtested a few of our games in the past, and I'd invited specifically to play it based on his experience of one of the other games in the Warbirds series. And he himself is Jewish and he has a lot of knowledge. Like he's very well spoken. He's very, he could bring, he brings a lot to the table. In that first playtest, he brought a lot of history to bear. So it was one of the things I wanted to know when he was coming is,

is if he would know about it, if it would ring a bell, if he could see the ending coming. And in the moment, there was this actually quite brilliant player moment. He brought a real presence to the table when we were playing because he was playing Ruth, the sister, the sister and brother pair. And the brother had been taken away. And as he was taken away, he started to sing. He started to sing and I didn't understand it. But I looked at Jess and then emotionally understood it. He was singing a morning prayer.

He was singing as if my brother's already dead. He was saying the cottage for this character. Yeah. And the whole table went just still when he did it. And the whole game took on this very somber tone from that point until the end point. And his other character, when he was playing his male character, was a very intellectual Jewish man who had a publishing industry. with his wife at the beginning of the game.

And they had a very close-knit relationship over the course of it. And he was the first person, his character was the first character to be released. And the scene is him going through the process of being released and walking out into the thinking he's being deported, walking out into the square and seeing her and having no one holding him anymore and the connection between these two characters. and he blinked and he looked at the character playing his wife and he looked at me who was running the game and he kind of looked at Jess who was sitting there with him as in like, is this a trap?

And then moved in through the scene as if it was happening and then they had a conversation and character. And there was tears at the table and that scene ended. And he didn't ask right away, but went through with a much curious eye to see how this was going to turn out. And the very first thing out of his mouth at the end was, is it real? Is it real? Did this actually happen?

And we said, yeah. And he wanted some details about the history, and we gave it to him. And he said he'd never heard of it before, never ever heard of it before. But was really glad to have known it for sure. And that's a fairly common reaction, I think, rarely as sort of dramatic. as with this player. But people will often say, like, I can't believe this, right? Did you just make that part up for the game?

And we will actually point them toward resources where they can learn more. And a number of our players have actually gone on to do things like visit the Rosenstrasse Memorial in Berlin because they've – We get pictures. Selfies, selfies at the Rosenstrasse Memorial in Berlin from people who've played our game because they feel this deeply personal connection to it. And it's sort of, it's almost like a beacon in a way that it gives them hope that like when you stand up and do something difficult and courageous, it can make a difference. You can save lives. You can stand up against oppression.

And so I think they kind of go away with like, wow, like this, this is really possible and this is possible for me. And then you start getting pictures from the Rosenstrasum Memorial. So I have one final question for you guys, and Matt, maybe you have something else, but how do you get people to play games like this? It sounds like the results you're getting are exactly the results you're looking for, at least in some cases. How do you actually get people to play? And do you think that it would be beneficial? I mean, is this something that people should be doing in their own living rooms or what setting do you see for them? So so far, we've been taking this game.

to game festivals, conventions, other kinds of events where people are coming to roleplay and to have new kinds of role-playing experiences. We've also been running sessions at CMU, and we've just sort of been advertising, like, you can come and play this game, and we've had a steady stream of people showing up who just want to understand what it's like, who care about history or who are excited about role-playing, and want to do something new. One of the things that we have been thinking about is what is the long-term trajectory for the game.

We've had people, for example, approach us and say, well, we're educators, could we assign this in our classes? And I think that it's really important to both of us, and Mo, you can step in if I'm overstepping, that this is something that people should choose to do. So we would like people to be running this in their living rooms for their friends, for their communities. But we don't ever want someone to come to this game because they have to.

We want people to come to this because they care about new kinds of role-playing experiences, because they care about history, because they care about activism and resisting oppression, because they care about women and women's history, right? There's a lot of ways for people to connect to the game. I think that the minute you say you have to, it really changes the kinds of experiences you get out of it. Jessica Moyer, thank you so much for coming on the show and telling us about this. Oh, thank you very much for inviting us. We're really happy to be here. Thank you. It's great.

That's it this week. Thank you for listening to the show. War College is me, Matthew Galt, and Jason, Jason Fields. Please subscribe to us on iTunes and leave a rating or a comment. It helps other people find the show. and if you're lucky, Jason will read your comment on the air. We've got some bonus episodes coming up, as well as a discussion about the future of artificial intelligence on the battlefield, and look at the Russian criminal underground

and a peek at some of the conflicts no one is covering. See you next week, and thank you for listening.