W. Eric Martin: Postcards from Berlin #21: The Unexpected Columnist

German word of the month: Geil (cool—see the bottom of this column for details)

Editor’s note: The Postcard from Berlin this month bears a secret American postmark. Postcard columnist Jeff Allers was kind enough to show my wife Linda and me around Berlin for a day, so I’m returning the favor by doing postcard duty—although I’m not sure how all this will fit on a 3x5.

Even most of my travel into, out of, and around Europe has been by airplane or automobile, I still think of trains as the archetypal European mode of transportation—and after driving five hours from the Spiel game convention in Essen to Munich in mid-October, I was looking forward to riding the train to Berlin on the Tuesday after Spiel. I could sleep, eat, read, goof around, and otherwise do things that are impossible to safely do while driving a car.

The book on the table is The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall, which was recommended by a BGN reader after I expressed admiration for House of Leaves. So as not to spoil the plot for others, I’ll say only that the idea behind Raw Shark was enticing, but the execution failed for me as the last third of the book read just like a certain shark-based novel and movie from decades past with no literary extras to make it more interesting. The graphical tricks seemed largely wasted or overblown compared to what might have been used, and the promise of the book wasn’t met. I wish authors lifted ideas as freely as game designers do because I’d love to see someone else tackle the concepts in this book and reinterpret them.

Once in Berlin, Linda and I made our way to the hotel, then started searching for our usual dinner destination: whatever Indian restaurant is closest. I’m not an expert on Indian cuisine, but what’s on offer at German Indian restaurants differs from what’s available in the U.S. The dishes seem to be less saucy, so a Masala dish that would normally (from my point of view) be swimming in a spicy tomato-based sauce instead has spices and tomatoes worked into the main food elements. Okra is an unexpected ingredient that I ran across on every Indian menu, and even though I was born in the South (Chattanooga to be precise), I’ve never had as much okra as I did in Germany.

With dinner out of the way, we needed to find a café, and while you can barely walk ten feet in large German cities without encountering a tiny café with seating for four, we had spotted one called Kakao on a tourist map and walked ten blocks or so until we finally spotted it. As the name suggests, the café specialized in chocolate drinks, and I had a fantastic, thick hot chocolate flavored with orange while Linda slowly worked her way through a chili-tinged cocoa.

I’m amazed that so many cafés can stay in business, yet almost all of the German cafés I’ve been in have a feeling and look of permanance. Their style of decoration seems to have grown organically over the years, with bits of décor being added as the owners ran across items in garage sales or estate clearances or had some brainstorm for a unique look. Kakao, for example, had a 20-foot-long map of the world on its ceiling with the continents outlined by broken squiggly lines. The walls held maps of South America and Africa, perhaps in a reference to cocoa production.

On Wednesday, game designer and BGN columnist Jeff Allers met Linda and me in the morning, then proceeded to play the role of tour guide like an expert. Our first stop was the longest remaining section of the Berlin Wall, which is decorated in continuous murals of amateurish art and graffiti. While driving by the Wall, it looked like nothing, like a wall that you’re supposed to scale during military training. It’s laughable—this is the Wall that caused so much havoc?

Once you walk up to the Wall, though, it grows both in perception and in reality. Up close you realize that it’s about fifteen feet high. You realize that the sidewalk wouldn’t be there, the streetlights, cars and people. For decades, the land was a barren strip that East Germans couldn’t even approach, and the Wall was topped with barbed wire to provide an extra disincentive for people who thought about leaving—in case the armed guards weren’t convincing enough on their own. The graffiti, that ubiquitous symbol of youth armed with too much time and freedom, was added only after the Wall became just another wall.

Our next stop was Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial. Designed by architect Peter Eisenman, the Holocaust Memorial is a radical departure from what one thinks a memorial should be. It contains no explanatory tags or symbolism, and instead features only 2,700+ concrete blocks (called “steles” or “stelea") that are aranged geometrically across nearly five acres.

When you first approach the Memorial, it looks like a playground display, something which invites you to jump from the top of one short block to the next. But as you cross the cobblestone walkway and go deeper into the exhibit, the ground sinks bit by bit and the blocks grow taller until they’ve cut off your view of the outside world. The ground tilts this way and that, throwing you off balance. The blocks themselves are subtly tilted, and no two adjacent blocks line up exactly so the pathway through the blocks keeps changing in width. Your vision is cut off, you walk through the Memorial somewhat blindly, and you’re surprised whenever someone suddenly appears on the crosswalk. An unexpected encounter, yes, but at least you can walk away from it.

The Memorial is a striking display of the writer’s maxim “show, don’t tell.” Rather than write about what happened, the structure throws you into an uncomfortable situation, a manufactured world that has enough bits out of place that you’re uneasy inside of it. Touch the blocks, and they’re colder than you’d expect. Spin around a few times, and you’d have no clue which direction to head in and what might await you when you arrive. Thankfully you’re free to choose another direction if the first one isn’t to your liking.

The barrenness of the Memorial is disorienting, and the accompanying Information Centre, (which lies underneath the Memorial) is its match, even though the museum is overflowing with details of Holocaust history. The museum starts with a timeline of World War II, with a multitude of details about crimes, deportations, and killings committed by German soldiers during that time. Accompanying the timeline are pictures showing, for example, piles of bodies, burned and deserted streets, or pictures of soldiers shooting Jewish women who stand on the edge of a pit.

Leave this room, and you’ll enter another which has enlarged and illuminated letters from Holocaust victims on its floor. In the letters, the writers express rage, despair, curiosity and fear. They don’t know what their fate will be, which is bad and unsettling—or they do know, which is worse.

The next room chronicles entire families, with pictures of groups and individuals and details of their fates in World War II. A family might have nine members, for example, and six of them were killed in concentraion camps, while one more is missing presumed dead, an eighth fled to the Netherlands, and a ninth was disguised and avoided detection. Interspersed with family portraits are documents from soldiers that detail the number of Jews they’ve killed, sometimes naming the family members in their lists.

In the flatness of its descriptions, the Information Centre mimics the concrete slabs above. It avoids hyperbole and drama, letting the details of history tell the visitor everything he or she might want to know. Even the official name of the location—Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe—is a flat and drained description, despite its implications of violence.

What’s extraordinary for me is the lack of self-flagellation, the absence of apology, in both the Memorial and the Information Centre. There’s no hand-wringing and dropping to the knees to beg the world’s forgiveness for past crimes—yet the entire display is simultaneously nothing but apology. The wealth of evidence shown makes a mockery of anyone who would deny the Holocaust. What country would claim such horrors as their own if they hadn’t happened?

For a country to lay out the crimes committed by its citizens in such detail is astonishing. Does the U.S. boast such museums about the crimes our ancestors committed against Native Americans? In decades to come, will we establish memorials to record our arrogance and crimes in invading a country that had not attacked or threatened us? In imposing our desire for a certain style of government in a manner that ridicules the principles we profess?

Jeff proved to be an extremely knowledgable tour guide, laying out a path that took us through the most historic parts of Berlin while also telling us bits of history. While showing us the Brandenburg Gate and talking about the old division between East and West Germany, for example, he mentioned that Napoleon stole the sculpture atop the Gate after defeating Prussia in 1806. (The sculpture is a quadriga—a four-horse chariot—with Viktoria, the goddess of victory, holding the reins.)

Of course Napoleon himself didn’t make off with the quadriga. He surely passed the order to one of his generals, who passed it to a lieutenant, and so on until some poor group of French soldiers heard what they had to manuever this unwieldy sculpture off the 65-foot-tall gate and somehow get it back to Paris.

Soldier #1: “We have to do what?“

Soldier #2: “Is the runt out of his mind? Does he have any idea of what this will involve?”

Soldier #3: “He doesn’t care. He’s already off in that café enjoying a latte.”

Soldier #2: “Can’t we just take a photo of him in front of the gate?”

Soldier #3: “Photography hasn’t been invented yet, dummy.”

Soldier #1: “How about we just pack a big box with rocks, then claim that some magician must have switched the sculpture for rocks on the way back to Paris?”

Lieutenant: “How about you grunts do less yakking and more sculpture packing?”

The Brandenburg Gate stands near the Reichstag, which Christo famously wrapped in 1995 with fabric and aluminum. Jeff Allers, who moved to Berlin in 1994, said that the atmosphere around the Reichstag was of a continuous party.

The Gate faces the Pariser Platz (plaza) and is one of only two structures on the Platz that was still standing at the end of World War II. New buildings now surround the Gate, including the new U.S. Embassy, which is still under construction despite its announcement in 1992. Security concerns, even prior to 9/11, delayed its construction as U.S. officials wanted to have certain setbacks from surrounding roadways to prevent truck bombs from threatening the building, while these setbacks would impinge on the open space around the Brandenburg Gate on one side and the Holocaust Memorial on the other. Construction finally began in 2004, and the building is expected to be ready by 2008.

Jeff also took us to Checkpoint Charlie, which was the crossing point between East and West Berlin for non-Germans. The shop near the Checkpoint featured thousands of bits of the Berlin Wall for sale, each of which had a flat side decorated with spray paint from graffiti. As Jeff pointed out, there’s no way to verify that the pieces all came from the Wall and looking at the volume of bits for sale nearly two decades after the fall of the Wall, your mind naturally pictures a masonry/graffiti production plant hidden in a warehouse outside the city.

(After returning to the U.S. we told our housesitter about the Berlin trip, and she mentioned that she had visited Checkpoint Charlie in the 1970s. At that time, soldiers with rifles surrounded the area, and the Berlin Wall cut that section of town in two.)

After a break for lunch and (of course) coffee, we headed to Spielwiese, the gamestore/café that Jeff profiled in his August 2007 Postcard from Berlin. We met store owner Michael Schmitt, then broke out my copy of Qwirkle, which I had brought from the U.S. as a present for Jeff. Game designers Andrea Meyer (Ad Acta, Hossa, Mall World) and Thorsten Gimmler (Geschenkt, Gangster) joined Linda and me for a game. Andrea made light of the game, as many do when they first hear the rules for Qwirkle ("That’s all there is to it?"), but Linda and I crushed the two of them, with me barely ekeing out the win.

Since Andrea’s new game from BeWitched Spiele requires lots of German, we offered to instead play Thorsten’s latest release, Gangster, but Andrea protested, pointing out that she had likely played the game fifity times while helping playtest the design. Instead Thorsten taught us Oregon, the Hans im Glück release from Henrik and Ase Berg.

Don’t pay too much attention to the Oregon name—this game is a European title through and through, not that that’s a bad thing. The Oregon gameboard has a grid superimposed on a landscape, with the grid composed of five columns and five rows; each column and row has an icon (fire, settlers, wagon, etc.) by it, and each space within the grid is subdivided into six spaces.

Players score points during the game by placing meeples next to buildings (which they also place) and collecting gold and coal. To place a building on the board, a player discards a building card from his hand along with an icon card to show in which row or column the building must be placed. To place a meeple, the player discards two icon cards and places a meeple on an empty space where a row/column with one icon intersects a column/row with the other icon. Every time you place a meeple next to a building or a building next to a meeple (whether yours or your opponents), the meeple owner will score points and possibly receive another bonus.

Gimmler, who works for Schmidt Spiele which is distributing Oregon and other Hans im Glück products, had clearly played the game a few times because he cleaned the floor with us, setting up huge scoring plays again and again. Oregon fits the archetype of HiG with its clean game play, modest level of interaction and indirect competition, and attractive graphic design.

Someone disapproves of the cards she’s won in Filou


After Oregon, while Linda played Qwirkle again with Thorsten, Jeff, and Alexander and beat them all by at least thirty points, I played Friedemann Friese’s Filou, which I had played once previously at Spiel. I was eager to see how the game would play with three or four players, but I joined the game as player #5.

Filou is an utterly charming game, and while you can track the cards played by everyone else to deduce with some degree of certainty what others might play, I had fun winging it. The lots that you’re bidding on are revealed bit by bit as the round progresses, and their value can swing mightily depending on a single card. Günter Cornett, designer of Hey! That’s My Fish! and Flaschenteufel and shown at right in the photo above, collected a fantastic clutter of cats to win. As with many auction games, you don’t want to strand yourself without money or else you’ll be forced to drop out of rounds early, which will earn you less money than others and keep you in an underdog position.

Linda and I have tried a lot of Qwirkle variants over the past six months. What we haven’t previously done is create dioramas with the pieces, but they work great for just such a purpose. After finishing their game, Linda, Jeff and Alexander (pictured above) created this scene. Can anyone guess what’s being depicted?

We spent a second day in Berlin—walking through St. Marien’s church, seeing the Berliner Dome, and viewing some amazingly odd artwork—but I seem to have filled both sides of the postcard already, so I’ll talk about that day in another column that covers Germany in general.

I do have enough space, though, to squeeze in one last observation. Slang is constantly evolving in English, and what’s “cool” in one generation will be “rad,” “awesome,” or “wicked” in the next. Naturally this process takes place in other languages as well, and Jeff mentioned that the common parlance for “cool” among German youth is the word “Geil"—which also happens to mean “horny.”

Make of that what you will, but we did see the phrase “Blonde ist Geil” in a Berlin beauty salon. I cannot confirm (or deny) the horniness levels of blondes in Berlin, but blonde as a haircolor is most definitely cool in Germany. I saw many women, from teen through senior citizen, who had dyed their hair blonde, and it was interesting to note that the dye jobs were obvious. While women in the U.S. dye their hair to conceal, German women apparently dye their hair as decoration; they would dye the top half of their hair blonde while the underside was jet black, or they would have streaks or spots of color, or glowing red highlights, or a few inches of colored hair on top of something colored naturally.

I would guess that 90% of the women I saw, both in Berlin and Munich, dyed their hair, and no one pretended they didn’t. The dye was an artistic expression, a fashionable accessory to their chic scarves, coats, boots and gloves. Sehr Geil…

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A final PS, written in Morse code on the very edge of the postcard: During lunch, Jeff showed Linda and me a prototype game that he had designed, and we played once. The game will remain secret for the moment, but I will say that (1) in retrospect I’m surprised that this game hasn’t been designed previously because it’s so clean and intuitive and (2) the subject matter is related to a special article that ran on BGN in the fall of 2007, although not intentionally. After we returned to Munich from Berlin, Jeff emailed to say that the game had been picked up by a German publisher (which will remain unannounced until the contract is signed) and should be out in the Nuremberg crop of 2008. Kudos to Herr Allers!

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Comments:

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Nice article, Eric--definitely “Geil” :) It was fun spending the day with you and Linda, and the group at the Spielwiese enjoyed having you as our “guests of honor” as well. It’s always interesting to read the observations of others.  Even though I have more than enough material to keep writing “Postcards” for awhile, I’ve been a Berliner so long that I often take things for granted here. It was also fascinating to learn about you and Linda’s writing careers.  The time passed too quickly, but you’re always welcome to visit us again. By the way, apparantly a couple of Essen attendees from the U.S. stopped into Michael’s Spielwiese that Thursday night after reading about it on BGN.  To bad they missed the party the night before. Posted by Jeff Allers on Nov 6, 2007 at 05:46 AM | #

Is the Qwirkle sculpture a church pulpit? Posted by Jonathan Degann on Nov 6, 2007 at 11:59 AM | #

Very nice article, Eric, worthy of its namesake.  And congratulations on the new game, Jeff!  Once can be a fluke, but twice proves that you’re a realio trulio game designer!  Keep ‘em coming! Posted by Larry Levy on Nov 6, 2007 at 12:02 PM | #

Jonathan guessed: Is the Qwirkle sculpture a church pulpit? No, and if I had published the mostly colorless images that I shot in St. Marien’s church in Berlin, you would understand why. The structure of medieval churches is gorgeous, but aside from the stained glass they’re pretty drab. Posted by W. Eric Martin on Nov 6, 2007 at 12:34 PM | #

Sorry--I can’t resist a hint, Eric, since I WAS one of the artists of the Quirkle sculpture: The idea started with the floor, of which about half is visible, and was part of our actual Qwirkle game (c’mon, Eric, I gave Linda some real competition at least a few seconds mid-game).  Each of the other Quirkle symbols represent something specific that relates to the floor.  Any ideas? Posted by Jeff Allers on Nov 6, 2007 at 01:12 PM | #

My compliments Eric and describing the Berlin ‘Jewish Memorial’ in such a telling manner. It is something totally impossible to appreciate from a photograph.  One simply needs to walk through it as you did. But I think it wrong to draw parallels with what your (and our) ancestors did to the native American (or Australians come to that).  Whilst some form of memorial would be an acknowledgement it would be nothing more than that - a future generation re-assessing the past.  The incredible point that the Berlin memorial makes is that it is a commemoration of a terrible crime that was perpetrated within the lifetime of many of the people visiting it - and with a full or partial knowledge of a number of them I imagine.  That is what is so very telling and also so very chilling about it.  Despicable acts by individuals are often used to charactarise a conflict’s evils but these can often be offset by the kindness and humanity of others (seldom reported because they are not sensational).  But the holocaust was a policy of an evil regime that was put in place by many people still living in Germany - or certainly their parents.  I find it hard to understand the younger generation’s feelings when they visit this memorial.  But that they clearly do visit it - and in great and silent numbers - is to be greatly admired. - Derek Posted by Derek Carver on Nov 8, 2007 at 08:57 AM | #

Not sure I see all the colours correctly, but it certainly seems to do with mixing primary and secondary colours.  Eg Red and Green to make Yellow, Red and Blue to make Magenta [Purple?] Posted by Ian Mackey on Nov 9, 2007 at 01:16 PM | #

I understand, Derek, that memorials to more recent events do have a stronger emotional impact on visitors who did live through those events, but what is left of the generation that lived through the Holocaust is disapearing, and most of the visitors to the memorial in Berlin have no personal connection to the events themselves. I would argue that it is still important, however, for that very reason.  As the eyewitnesses decrease in number, it is even more important to make a record for future generations.  I applaud the effort of architects such as Eisenmann and Daniel Liebeskind, whose works (including Liebeskind’s recently completed Jewish Museum) include experiential elements that lift the exhibits above dry re-assessement of the past. I would also welcome such memorials to those victimized in the name of my home country, not as self-flagellation but rather, as Jewish survivors often say, “to never forget” and to learn from the past. Though the extent and organization of the Nazi’s cruelness was historically unprecedented, those of us from other countries need to be careful of separating ourselves too much and categorizing it as a German phenomena.  And though there are many stories of kindness in the face of such horrific events, the Holocaust also serves as a warning of the evil that all of us are capable of. Posted by Jeff Allers on Nov 13, 2007 at 12:58 PM | #

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