Читать книгу Avidly Reads Board Games - Eric Thurm - Страница 9

For the first time, my Brooklyn basement was packed full of Jews hungry for Shabbat dinner. Ten or so people had come over to eat falafel out of plastic dishes, drink kiddush wine from a glass I’d borrowed from my parents, and wear yarmulkes I’d bought at a nearby Judaica store. But they’d also come over on that misty, brisk night in February to play Juden Raus, a Nazi Germany–era game about forcibly removing Jewish families from their homes in order to deport them to Palestine.

After saying the necessary blessings and tucking into the food, a few of us moved over to a coffee table in a corner of the basement where I’d set up the makeshift Juden Raus board, printed out on a large piece of poster paper. Our version of the rules had been loosely translated from the original German by a friend and read off my phone. We used pieces from other games, since I didn’t have the original wooden pieces depicting German police officers, and I definitely didn’t have the wooden hat pieces that represented the Jewish families we’d be deporting, each one marked with a face sporting a grossly anti-Semitic scowl.

Still, I was excited: I’d been looking forward to playing Juden Raus. I spent weeks casually mentioning my plans to “play a Nazi board game” in conversation; most of the time, I could sense the other person starting to sprint away, even if the conversation was happening over the phone. Thankfully, I had enough friends who were morbidly curious (or at least willing to humor me) to set up a Shabbat-dinner session of Juden Raus. This admittedly bizarre experience was also the culmination of a years-long desire: discovering the existence of Juden Raus was what got me interested in the ideological uses of board games in the first place.

In the fall of 2013, at the height of my Catan obsession, I was enrolled in a class called New and Emerging Genres, which covered recently developed forms of storytelling like video games, interactive fiction, and autobiographical comics. Students were asked to write blog posts either responding to something someone had said in class or describing a genre we hadn’t covered but that could have been included in the syllabus—why we found it compelling, what it might be able to do that other genres couldn’t, and what we might have discussed were it to be the subject of a lesson. One night, looking for something new to write about and hopped up on, among other things, Catan and cheap beer, I stumbled upon a Wikipedia page titled “Nazi Board Games.” Shocked, scintillated, and stoned in equal measure, I eagerly read up on the history of these games—specifically, on the history of Juden Raus.

Here’s what I learned about Juden Raus: The game was created by Günther & Co., a game manufacturer based in the German toy hub of Dresden, as a way of cashing in on the popularity of the Nazi government’s anti-Semitic policies. It was most likely published in 1936, a year after the passage of the Nuremberg Laws limited the political rights of German Jews and just two years before Kristallnacht, the pogrom that broadly initiated the Nazi government’s support for mass violence against Jews. That first night, I assumed that Juden Raus was officially sanctioned—and possibly produced by—the Nazis. It was easy for my couch-ridden self to imagine Aryan children eagerly playing the game while sitting around the dinner table, shrieking in delight at the prospect of exiling the Jews. In fact, while I was writing my blog post, I distinctly remembered reading that Joseph Goebbels himself endorsed the game and had a hand in planning what were essentially interactive toys for Hitler Youth.

This was, it turned out, not at all correct. (Who knew there was a problem with doing research stoned? Or with relying on Wikipedia?) The page for “Nazi Board Games,” or at least the version of it I looked at that night, merely cited Goebbels’s principles of propaganda in relation to the existence of the game, rather than crediting him directly—and, in fact, Juden Raus was, to put it lightly, not a hit with the regime: in 1938, Das Schwarze Korps, the official newspaper of the SS, published an anonymous editorial criticizing Juden Raus for trivializing and profiting off the gravely important work the SS was doing to “fend off the Jewish rabble of murderers.”

The rest of Juden Raus’s history is otherwise shrouded in mystery, up to and including how well the game actually sold. While Juden Raus is commonly cited as having sold about a million copies, other sources suggest that in fact it sold very poorly in the face of official opposition, and that the high initial estimates were the result of bluffing on the part of the distributor. There’s some debate over the exact identity of the manufacturer, the background of the distributor, and even the year the game was published. (1936 seems most likely, but there’s a chance it might have been 1938.) One rumor about the game suggested Juden Raus might never have actually made it to market and that the two known copies in existence were just prototypes for the never-completed final product.

At the time, I didn’t know any of this information. Knowing it now, it doesn’t affect the way I think about Juden Raus, really; the mere existence of a game about rounding up and deporting Jewish people that was actually manufactured in whatever capacity was horrifying enough to capture my imagination—the image of that Aryan family having a pleasant evening at the dining room table was simply too powerful to ignore. Apparently, the thought held a certain undeniable attraction, or perhaps compulsion, for other people as well: by the time I learned of its existence, Juden Raus had become something of a minor legend in the board game community. It is commonly referred to as “history’s most infamous board game.”

Once I learned about the Das Schwarze Korps editorial, it became the most fascinating part of the story. The Nazis were no strangers to spectacle: their propaganda efforts included rallies, films like The Triumph of the Will, and the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Board games, apparently, crossed the line—even though, depending on what version of the history you believe, Juden Raus seemed to be having at least some success in winning over children to the grim, horrifying cause. If you’re trying to marshal support for mass deportation and genocide, why be bashful about marketing your plan to children by whatever means you had available to you? What is it about board games that made them trivial, in contrast to any other form of Nazi hagiography? I wanted to understand what made board games special or, rather, what made them seem not special to most people who encountered them.

In my class blog post, I wrote that, as horrifying as Juden Raus was, it wasn’t all that different from games that served to impart current American ideology to children. The communicative force of board games, I wrote, came from forcing the players to act out life in the system modeled by the game—and I was onto something. A board game is, effectively, a set of rules you’re asked to interact with over and over in the hope of attaining some kind of fulfillment. If that sounds familiar, it might be because that’s the premise behind many, many aspects of modern life that have been transformed into games: people learn languages by playing with apps like Duolingo, measure their physical activity with tools like Fitbits, and trawl for likes, favorites, and retweets on social media. Pickup-artist culture is quite literally premised on the idea of scoring. Other mundane activities—buying health insurance, visiting the DMV—are just deeply unfun games without the chance to quit. These are all games that permeate our day-to-day experience, systems of rules that we’re trained to interact with in the same way we learn to play Life.

“Game” is frequently used as an example of a word that captures the slipperiness at the heart of living in the world and of trying to use language in it. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein uses the term “language-game” to describe a particular sort of interaction one can have while using words and the rough set of rules or norms that govern those interactions. (For example, making a joke, telling a story, asking for a favor.) Many people who follow Wittgenstein’s lead accordingly use “game” as an example of the way most words don’t have fixed definitions, at least not in a way that supersedes how the word is actually used. Anyone attempting to identify a single characteristic that unifies and is present in all games will be disappointed. There are games where the object is not to compete with other people, games where there is no winner, and even, sometimes, games where there are no rules. “Game” as a concept refers instead to a cluster, a constellation of ideas and features. Capture the flag can be a game, but so can spin the bottle or Halo. All instances of games don’t need to share every aspect of the definition. Games are many things, and they are—or can be—powerful.

To be fair, there are games that have next to zero influence on the people playing them—and, of course, there are people who don’t take much away from the games that they play. But that’s true of any form of human expression, even the ones that we spend lifetimes theorizing. The special thing about games, and tabletop games in particular, is the way they actively train you to think from within their rules. Other forms of art do this too, but in a more roundabout way that requires a certain sensitivity and willingness to be taken in by the television show you’re watching or the book you’re reading. With games, it’s a prerequisite to entry. If you don’t think the way the game wants you to think at least a little bit, you’re not really playing the game at all.