What If We Could Resolve Generational Trauma Through…a Holocaust Video Game?
What If We Could Resolve Generational Trauma Through…a Holocaust Video Game?
What If We Could Resolve Generational Trauma Through…a Holocaust Video Game?
By Mira Fox
May 24, 2021
Summary
When I first heard about a new documentary, "Tacheles: The Heart of the Matter," which follows a group of Germans designing a video game about the Holocaust, in which "Jews can defend themselves and Nazis can act humanely," I thought it sounded like a recipe for disaster.
The film, which premiered at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, follows Yaar, a Jewish Berliner seeking to adapt his grandmother Rina's experience surviving the Holocaust into a video game along with Marcel, a German whose ancestor was an S.S. officer.
"The game is about role reversal," he explains to his mother, "Whereby the Jews are given weapons to defend themselves. Who wants to identify with a club of victims?".
From there, the film takes a somewhat winding path through the game's development; it's easy to forget the group's ultimate goal of creating a video game over the course of the nearly two hours of the documentary.
The game's designers-Yaar, Marcel and Yaar's girlfriend, Sarah-move to a house in Poland where they squat, living out of sleeping bags on the floor in order to immerse themselves in the story, more method acting than video game design.
Ultimately, the film is far more about Yaar's own struggle with his Jewish identity than it is about the game.
A game that changes the power dynamics and outcome of the Holocaust could potentially teach an incorrect narrative to players who don't know better, an increasingly common issue as Holocaust denial rises.
Yaar has worked through some of his generational trauma.
Yaar didn't leave the game entirely in the past; he's still working on it, he told me over Zoom, just with a different goal.
The game is now conceptualized as a narrative, choose-your-own-adventure-style game, following a Jew in Germany-but all of the choices lead to the same result, the death and horror of the Holocaust.
Reference
Fox, M. (2021, May 25). What if we could Resolve GENERATIONAL TRAUMA through...a Holocaust video game? JewishBoston. https://www.jewishboston.com/read/what-if-we-could-resolve-generational-trauma-througha-holocaust-video-game/