Binary Domain
Thirty years after the Wall fell, games are exploring what it means to remember a divided Germany
30 years after the Wall fell, games explore what it means to remember a divided Germany
“YOU CROSS THE STREET AND, SUDDENLY, THE ARCHITECTURE IS QUITE RADICALLY DIFFERENT”
Rain is falling on the morning of November 14 as the 8.15 to Rathaus Spandau pulls away from Falkensee Bahnhof. A vertical blade pulls across the sheer windscreen, neatly dividing the glass into wet and not-wet. Cobbles beneath the wheels rattle the frame of the bus until it reaches the main road, where the percussion becomes irregular, kicking in at intervals as the wheels dip in and out of potholes. These pockmarked streets are shared with the Trabants, the boxy sedans which had seemed so modern in the 1950s; now, in 1989, their missing turn signals make them an antiquated hazard. Nobody gets off at the last stop before the border checkpoint, a fresh breach in the Wall that opened up for traffic just yesterday. For decades, passing through could have meant imprisonment or death. But at a press conference four days ago, the GDR’s governing party announced an end to travel
restrictions between East and West Germany. “As far as I know, it takes effect immediately,” East Berlin boss Günter Schabowski had said. “Without delay.”
He was wrong – the party had intended the border to open up the following day – but it didn’t matter. Hours after his comments were broadcast, 10,000 people were at the Bornholmer Bridge checkpoint in Berlin. In the absence of orders, the border guards relented, but stamped the passports of those at the front of the queue in such a way as to deny them re-entry. It was a final, impotent act by a state still working to keep tabs on its people, even after the point it had lost the capacity to wield that coveted information against them. Cardboard signs sit in the windows of the Rathaus Spandau bus, hurried and temporary. Public transport routes were one of the first things to change when construction of the Berlin Wall began in 1961, and when it fell they quickly reverted. At the end, buses announced the return of personal freedom in all its everyday mundanity.
This journey was recreated in detail for OMSI2, the German simulator which meticulously models the experience of Berlin bus drivers between 1986 and 1994. Such is its verisimilitude that Isaac Ashdown, a game developer and resident of the city since 2008, recognises his own regular ride from Spandau across the former border. “That’s actually a route I take fairly often, because my favourite lake in the city is one that was on the border,” he says. “It went right down the middle. I go there with my dog in the summer.” It’s one of many ways the city’s history has revealed itself to Ashdown. “It’s not something I really put any thought into before,” he says. “I moved here for the gay scene and because I got a pretty good job.” By the time he left that job, after the cancellation of Yager’s Dead Island 2, he was fascinated by the way in which the line through Berlin had become visible to him, even in the Wall’s absence. “You cross the street and, suddenly, the architecture is quite radically different, a lot more Brutalist in the east,” he says. “That includes urban planning: in the west they ripped up all the tram lines and replaced them with car-friendly roads. And the other thing is the people.”
West Berlin is home to Turkish communities recruited after 1961 as Gastarbeiter (guest workers). By contrast, East Berlin areas like Lichtenberg – which housed the headquarters of the Stasi, the German Democratic Republic’s sprawling intelligence service – are distinguished by their Vietnamese population, started during socialist migration in the 1980s. Those old capitalist and communist battle lines are still apparent, even in the makeup of the city’s population. It’s perhaps then not surprising that Ashdown and two of his former Yager colleagues, artist Rafal Fedro and designer Jan David Hassel, imagined a game world where the Berlin Wall still existed into 2089. All Walls Must Fall, a tactics and espionage game set in the nightclubs of a future GDR, is set in a divided Germany where both sides on the front of the Cold War have become only more entrenched, thanks to the development of time-travel technology that allows agents to counter each others’ moves in retrospect. The trio of developers, known as Inbetween Games, added another ‘S’ to the Stasi to create STASIS.
There’s something deeply scary about the idea of these notorious secret-scribblers cataloguing not only a citizen’s past, but their future as well. In the GDR’s 40 years, the Stasi produced a number of files equivalent to all of Germany’s records since the Middle Ages. How full would their filing cabinets have been after 140? That fear becomes palpable in the dialogue sequences of All Walls Must Fall: interrogations in which your STASIS officer flirts or threatens their way to information about an imminent nuclear attack. “Ahh… you must be that suspect I saw so much about,” you might bluff. “I know what you’ll do tonight. Doesn’t look good. At all.” Ashdown explains: “We wanted these people in the clubs to feel helpless, because the authority is constantly rewinding the clock and changing what’s happened to them.”
This state of temporal helplessness captures the MO of the Stasi more perfectly than a strictly historical representation ever could. The GDR’s enforcers tortured people the traditional way, yes – but by the 1970s they had developed ways to control people that didn’t leave bruises. In a process codified as Zersetzung, or “degradation”, they subtly undermined targets’ selfconfidence, secretly wrecking careers and relationships. Their most effective manipulation took place in bland interrogation rooms, where they unpacked the intimate details of their victims’ lives – in one case, reading a citizen’s love letters to an Italian boyfriend back to them. Zersetzung often enabled the Stasi to recruit informers, but was designed principally to ‘switch off’ their enemies – removing the light from behind their eyes.