“Papers, Please,” Microhistory, and the Historical Agency of “Ordinary Men”

„Viele kleine Leute, die in vielen kleinen Orten viele kleine Dinge tun, können das Gesicht der Welt verändern.“

“Many small people, who in many small places do many small things that can alter the face of the world.”

-African wisdom (Berlin Wall Graffiti)

Who writes history? Despite the simplicity of the question, it is one that has troubled historians throughout the ages since the dawn of time. When we think about the “making of history,” so to speak, it is easy to think about the “great men” of the past. Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Churchill, etc., have undoubtedly shaped the course of history, for better or worse. They are, however, not the only ones.

Ever since the advent of Karl Marx and his theory on social classes, there had been a considerable effort to examine historical agency through a different light. Social historians such as E.P. Thompson focused on class relations and materiality inspired by Marxist theory, examining the struggles and triumphs of the working class as active participants in history,  supplementing (and to an extent replacing) the preconceived notion of the history of “great men.” This movement of “history from below” dominated the history mainstream well into the 1980s, and gave us a brand new perspective towards the making of history.

Despite its groundbreaking innovations, social history was not without its critics. A common critique of this methodology lies in its denial of individual agency. Although social historian have elevated the common folk as makers of history (instead of kings and general), they were “makers of history” only as a collective. Meaning, only the class of workers or soldiers, as a collective, can make a difference in the grand narrative. What a single person within that collective does or thinks is irrelevant. In addition, social historians operate almost exclusively on a materialistic basic, believing that economics is the “base” of all other aspects (relations of gender and race, religion, culture, etc.) of history, known as “superstructure.” These critiques led to the decline of social history and the rise of cultural history (which unfortunately won’t be a part of this post). In this historiographical transformation, along comes the video game Papers, Please, as well as a new school of thought known as “microhistory,” or the history of everyday life.

Papers, Please was released in 2013, and it’s a game that sounds, on paper (ha!), quite boring. The player acts as an immigration officer along the border of the fictional country Arstotzka, analogous to East Germany during the Cold War. In this capacity, the player has to perform a series of duties in order to verify the identity of people trying to enter Arstotzka, and filter out those that are not eligible for entry. Players are incentivized to go about their duties as quickly as possible, as the number of entries directly correlate with their earnings each day, which in turn provide food, heating, and other essentials for the player’s family. If protocols are not observed correctly, the player will receive a citation, and will lead to wage deduction after two citations. 

Despite having a fairly simple and mundane setting, the game offers an incredible insight into the life of a lowly government clerk during the Cold War. Driven by the game mechanics to be as efficient and as accurate as possible, the player nevertheless has the agency to breach protocol for a variety of reasons. When an old woman tries to cross the border to see her sick son, do you follow procedures and deny her entry for not having the right forms, or do you let her pass and take a citation and possible economic ramifications that come with doing so? Your choice. Despite being a fictional video game, Papers, Please brings up two important questions for historians. What makes people do what they do? How much agency do people really have?

What makes people do what they do? This is an extremely poignant question coming after the twentieth century. With numerous atrocities on grander scales than ever before, what turns people into senseless killers? This is a question that the “great men” political history and the economics-focused social history struggle to answer. There is no doubt that Adolf Hitler had a significant impact on the policies of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, but what about the people on the ground? Were they completely convinced by Nazi ideology, did they feel unable to change the world around them and simply “followed orders,” or was it something else?

In Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, historian Christopher Browning focuses his attention on one of the units responsible for carrying out mass executions in Poland. The vast majority of these people were not die-hard Nazis nor members of the SS. Most of them were middle-aged working class men, some were members of the Social Democratic Party during the Weimar Republic, groups not generally associated with fanatic Nazism. At the beginning of the unit’s mass killing operation in Poland, members of Battalion 101 were extremely uncomfortable with their actions, and the unit commander even explicitly allowed members to not participate in the killings without any punishment. However, out of a battalion of around 500, only 12 men took up that offer. By the end of the war, Battalion 101 was responsible for the death of 83,000 people, both indirectly through sending people to extermination camps, and directly in mass shooting operations. After analyzing the battalion members’ day-to-day lives, Browning came to the conclusion that these men were just “ordinary men.” And while they were not fanatical Nazis, their innate obedience to authority as well as peer pressure led them to committing unimaginative atrocities (for the social psychological phenomenon, see Milgram Experiment).

How much agency do people have? From Browning’s findings, a lot and very little, simultaneously. No one was putting a gun to these people’s heads, and they had complete freedom to not participate in the mass shootings. Some people did walk away, without any negative consequences from the Nazi regime. However, these people were the minority. Despite the lack of ideological motivations, the vast majority of the unit was nevertheless responsible for the murder of over eighty thousand people. These sort of socio-cultural interactions and relations come to the surface with microhistory analysis, and their intricacy could easily be lost in a top-down analysis that either only blames Hitler and top Nazi leaders for the Holocaust, or categorize the entire German population as murderous Nazi fanatics and calls it a day.

Let there be no mistake, Christopher Browning was not trying whitewash the crimes of these people, nor am I. It is a common criticism, and other historians like Daniel Goldhagen have also criticized Browning and his work for downplaying the role of an inherently German tradition of anti-semitism. That is, however, far from the intent.

In our view, this criticism is misplaced. Far from providing an apologia for Hitler’s regime, Alltagsgeschichte (everyday history, or the history of everyday life) helped map the extent to which Nazi ideology managed to penetrate German society—forming “a fatal continuum … between daily discrimination and racial prejudice”—as well as spaces for resistance and opposition. Put differently, it was often Nazism’s “normalcy,” its “banality,” that rendered its crimes possible. Everyday history showed that there were few passive bystanders; its examination of the extension of state authority, capillary-like, into the minutiae of daily experience actually implicated more, not fewer, “ordinary” people in the functioning of the dictatorship.

-Introduction to The Politics of Everyday Life in Fascist Italy, by Joshua Arthurs, Michael Ebner, and Kate Ferris

And to me, this kind of analysis is why, despite being “only” a video game, Papers, Please and similar media are crucial for understanding history. Spending day after day in the shoes of a border control agent, a mere cog in the machine in the grand scheme of things, players can understand so much about history. The effects of the “Iron Curtain” in separating families and loved ones, the everyday hardship experienced by members of the Eastern Bloc, and so on. But most importantly (in my opinion), the game teaches its players empathy. It teaches the players the choices that a seemingly insignificant individual must make on a daily basis, juggling between the survival of one’s own survival, ethics and morality—doing most of the choice-making process in a split second as the game forces you to be as quick as possible. While (obviously) not a perfect reconstruction of history, Papers, Please offers historical insight that can not be accessed from East German official documents or census numbers.

Nor is Papers, Please the only example, both in and outside of the video game genre. My girlfriend introduced me to another game based on very similar principles by the name of My Child Lebensborn.

Taken from unmarried Aryan teenage women, some as young as 16, and their Nazi officer fathers, the Lebensborn was a nursery for Hitler’s master race, a kind of inverse Holocaust: the systematic, bureaucratic, nurture of life according to race. Around 12,000 of these children were born in Norway, whose blond-haired, blue-eyed giantesses fitted the Nazi profile of an ideal woman. When the war ended, these children, many of whom had been taken from their mothers to be raised in one of nine specialist SS homes in the country, were given up for adoption.

–The Guardian

As a postwar adoptive parent of a Lebensborn child, the player has to raise their child in an environment full of bullying and ostracization for the child’s backgrounds. It is tough to stomach, and my girlfriend admitted that she had to stop playing due to how depressing the game was. But it is such a valuable experience, offering its player empathy for these Lebensborn children that most probably have never heard of before, let alone understand their experiences.

In film, Son of Saul (2015) depicts the lives of the Sonderkommando, jewish “special units” forced to to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims in extermination camps. These pieces of media shed light upon the aspects of history that are regularly neglected, yet perhaps more relevant to the lives of most people not in places of real power. In my opinion, films, TV shows, and video games like these are much more valuable to the understanding of history than another top-down historical drama about Winston Churchill.

[All the Light We Cannot See] Review

“It’s a story about a German boy and a blind French girl during World War II, …”

“Of course.” Said my friend, to whom I was explaining the plot of the book to.

Of course. Of course it would be a German boy and French girl. Nationalism? Sexism? National-sexism? Is that even a word?

Jokes aside, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is a very delightful read. The use of language is exquisite: the choice of diction, the use of French and German words, the careful integration of classical music (Claire de Lune and L’Autunno) and classic novels (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) really feels like a carefully painted canvas, and it truly is beautiful. Especially in comparison to the run-of-the-mill novels we get these days, this is really a masterpiece of words. Most modern mainstream novels, The Hunger Games, Nicholas Sparks books, Twilight, A Song of Ice and Fire series (or are they already out of fashion? Its way too hard to keep up with book trends), while I enjoy and even personally love some (not all) of them, does not even come close in terms of usage of language. This above all shows the amount of care the writer put into his novel, and the care definitely paid off.

This novel, however, does have obvious problems. To continue with my opening anecdote, the story and character themselves are very much cliched by this time. The boy is a German who is also great with machines and technology, while the girl reads Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by the great French author Verne. I mean, how stereotypical. Which is perfectly fine. But the problem stems from the fact that this book did not really delve into the deeper psyche of these characters, truly question what makes them do what they do or think the way they think. I personally would compare this book with The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. And they are somewhat similar, both fictional tales during WWII, both are sort of coming-of-age stories, and both have shadows of a love story. While the use of language in The Book Thief is not as well as in this book, I personally feel a lot more with Liesel than either of the two characters from this book. There were no significant character developments, and none of them ever go through significant emotional turmoil or anything like that. It’s too calm, and as a result none of their decisions, Marie-Laure’s decision to help out with the French resistance, or Werner’s decision to cover for them, seem significant as far as character goes.

This book references a lot of history, and as a history major I do appreciate it a lot. Most of it is pretty accurate, and (being nitpicking as I am) I’ve only noticed one inaccuracy, with someone talking about “Reichswehr” (Imperial Defense), which (ironically) was the military of Weimar Republic and renamed the “Wehrmacht” during the Nazi era. But that’s really minuscule and doesn’t at all take away from the novel. What I would complain about is the lack of interaction between the characters and their historic setting. Going back to the comparison with The Book Thief, in the latter the characters actually engage in historic events, with Liesel witnessing the book burning, and Max being saved by Mein Kampf. It really feels like they were there and affected by these events on an emotional and mental level. And while Marie-Laure and Werner are affected by historic events, it always feel like it is purely physical and did not leave a lasting impact until perhaps after the end of the war. And I was really disappointed by the loss of such a great opportunity.

I do want to say, however, that I find the style of writing to be really great. Short sections of 1-2 pages forming up into larger chapters that fill the book is great. Every single one of these short sections feels like a world-class minimalist short stories to me, and without context of a bigger story they are really powerful. And the way these sections were presented it almost seems like a really well-shot TV-series (being better versed on screen, I would have to go back to movie/TV analogy sooner or later), but not a coherent one. Here is a piece of Marie-Laure’s life, and oh here’s a piece of Werner’s. Despite the extremely well written prose, the short stories themselves do not truly interconnect. The tone also shifted dramatically once, which really startled me. The novel, in one of its later sections, depicted Werner’s 15-year old sister Jutta being raped by Russian soldiers along with others in their orphanage. And I was so completely unable to react to it. Before this the novel was very restraint in its depiction of violence, or the lack of any. I was like, okay, this is a nice sweet G-rated work of art, and then it suddenly just went straight to something probably more than a R-rating. Before this section, the Russians have never been referenced, the audience have never seen Jutt’s POV since Werner left the orphanage, and nothing from this scene was ever mentioned, nor was its impact ever shown. Again, on its own, this scene could be extremely emotional and powerful, but given the context and its existence within this overarching story makes it stand out and really just does not fit. It was out of place, and made me shudder.

Before I started reading, I’ve heard people saying that it is “boring”, which I must say it really isn’t the case. As with many great novels, it has a long buildup. I remember that it took me like 5 times before I got past the first 30 pages of A Tale of Two Cities, but when I finally did get through the first chapter, I went through the entire book in 3 days, and it is probably my favorite novel of all time. This one is similar, in the sense that it takes some time to get to know the characters and settings, but the amount of effort and time put into formulating every sentence, it is definitely always pressing you to keep reading.

I know I have complained a lot about this book, but I have to stress that I really enjoyed reading it. In comparison to most novels these days, this would be a masterpiece. It is a very good book, please don’t get me wrong. The mastery of language is something I haven’t seen in a long time, and sadly it does mean that its problems would me much more obvious in comparison to what it got, well, perfect. The choice of words, the integration of dialogue in storytelling, and the formulation of short but powerful sections, there is so much one can learn from this book.

Because anyone who has at least tried to write a novel knows that coming up with a story is easy, but writing it out is hard

Which is why this novel is great

Which is why this novel is disappointing

The Shining by King and Kubrick

The Shining (1977) and “The Shining” (1980) are probably one of the greatest hallmarks of horror. The novel written by Stephen King and the movie made my Stanley Kubrick have became such recognizable elements of popular culture, especially the scene of the twin girls. The cartoon show “Phineas and Ferb”, with its references to classic movies like “Citizen Kane” or “Star Wars”, has more than once referenced “The Shining”, definitely weird for a children’s cartoon.

There is little doubt that Stephen King is one of the most prominent writers of this time. His many works have been made into movies or TV series, such as Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, Carrie, and many many others. My personal favorite of movies based on his writings is “The Mist”, which could possibly be my favorite horror of all times.

Stanley Kubrick is also a name film snobs would most certainly recognize. Director of “2001: A Space Odyssey”, “Lolita”, and “A Clockwork Orange”, his use of visual storytelling has always been fantastic, if not often haunting.

Such a pairing surely seems impeccable, and there is no doubt both the novel and the movie are very well done, but here I am, nitpicking the slight differences between the two incarnations and the effects they have on the reader/audience.

For starters, I must suggest watching the movie before reading the novel. I would suggest this for most movies or shows based on books, perhaps for the exception of the “Lord of the Rings” Trilogy and the “Game of Throne” show. “Harry Potter”, “The Hunger Games”, “The Hobbit”, among others, all have somewhat disappointed me. I like many elements of these movies, no doubt, but I’m certain that my level of enjoyment have been much reduced by setting high expectations by reading the novels beforehand. For “The Shining”, it is no different.

I first bought the book to read last year, and I loved it completely. The movie, on the other hand, while I can definitely enjoy its entertainment value and appreciate the art and magic of film making with which Kubrick treated his work (the movie is such a glorious show of great visual storytelling), I could not get into the story at all. In fact, it took me two viewings just to finish the movie.

The movie is very good, objectively speaking. It’s use of cinematography, the long shots used in many of the scenes, the look of the sets, and it was definitely scary. I like how the ending was done without too much detail into the future life of the mother and child, because cinematically everything was already said and done, objectively speaking and independent from the novel, because in doing so the movie left out my most favorite lines in the book, but I’ll get to that later. Anything bad to say about the movie without comparing it to the novel is what I consider to be overacting from the two adult leads, which to me was borderline comical in certain scenes.

Now, let me be perfectly clear: I understand that movies and books should not be the same, or too similar. A book allows for long dialogues, a longer time to set up the characters and story elements, while a movie is constrained by its time and visual limitations, without the ability to really do much with other senses such as smell, which would be possible in word form. A movie is done through the language of visuals and sound, while a book is done through the language of, well, language. The following complaints are mostly personal, something I would not have had if I have watched the movie before reading the novel.

As I have said before, a movie does not have the luxury of a long long build up, and this is really obvious when compared to the novel. In the novel the father was much better fleshed out as a sympathetic person, hoping to become a better person but slowly consumed by the phantoms of the hotel as well as his own ego. In the movie he just started out as a hateful human being, and that was the moment I had to stop the movie. In movie form this definitely works out better, since as a horror that wasn’t really the thrust of the movie, but this huge difference did take me out of the movie. Another complaint, and this one is more damaging to the movie itself, was the completely needless side story of the chef character, who told the boy about the “shining”, came back, got killed, and didn’t do anything at all. The entire side plot was pointless, while in the novel he survived, saved the mother and child, and helped them settle down eventually. He also had the best lines in the novel: “The world’s a hard place, Danny. It don’t care. It don’t hate you and me, but it don’t love us, either. ” And I think this is really a weak point for the movie.

Having said all that, the visuals of the movie definitely stands out, the effects still hold up, the use of music gives tension, and together they create a scary movie, not in a jump-scare filled way, but psychological and full of tense moments. Story wise, I don’t think it is as good as the novel, but it fulfills what it set out to be. It is a classic movie, not in the sense of “classic” as “Citizen Kane”, perhaps, but the imprints left by the movie on popular culture sure makes it a must see. And for fans of cinema, this is one of the best looking horrors out there.

If you plan to read the book, do so after the movie, you’ll be able to enjoy both a lot better this way.

Let the Right One In: Novel and Movies Thoughts

Let the Right One In was first a Swedish novel that came out 2004. The first movie adaptation came out in 2004, while a new American remake was released in 2010. I watched the American remake first in 2012, and subsequently read the book in 2014, and watched the Swedish movie this year (2016). I think this is a fascinating story, and all of these different ways of telling the story are different from each other, while all of which I find myself liking.

What is the story about? Well… It’s a story about young love… And there are vampires… My voice always trails off a bit whenever trying to explain it to my friends. I mean, when there are memes like this floating on the internet:

It is a pretty big accusation. I personally haven’t read any of the Twilight books or watched any of the movies, but through osmosis alone I can tell they are not the best stories or characters even told. But personally, I do not know if anything could be worse than the love story between Anakin and Padme, maybe that between Mila Kunis and Channing Tatus in “Jupiter Ascending”, but that’s not the point.

But, I always say, it is a seemingly dumb idea done well. Very well.

So the novel tells the story about a young boy Oskar who’s constantly bullied in school (of course), who befriended a girl Eli who just moved in with who he assumed to be her father. It is revealed later that the girl was not only a vampire, but also a young boy kidnapped, castrated, and transformed into a vampire by a satanic cult. “Her” “father” is in fact a pedophile who loves Eli and offers her sustenance by murdering people and collecting their blood. In one of his errands however, he was captured and he chose to pour acid on his face so the police would not be able to recognize him and lead they to Eli. Eli eventually located him in the hospital, and he offered her his blood as a final act of love, before falling to the ground. He survived the fall, becoming a vampire, but was eventually killed. Knowing Eli is a vampire, Oskar finally accepts her and protected her from a local townsman, leading to his horrifying death by Eli’s hand. When Oskar is again bullied in school more violently than ever, Eli saves him by murdering all the bullies. The story ends with Oskar leaving town with Eli in his suitcase, communicating with each other through Morse code.

What is the novel about? Oh dear, I must begin by saying while love is at the center of story, there are so much more: vampires (of course), pedophilia, castration, alcoholism, physical abuse, and a lot of dark elements. In book form, Let the Right One In was able to pull off so many themes within a single story. To me the book is a very good love story as well as a horror story, because it is really dark. One of the most memorable (and traumatic) scenes I remember the most was when after Eli’s “father” was turned into a vampire, his only desire was Eli. Even when he was hunted down by Eli and incapacitated, he still masturbated to Eli. And that was scarily memorable, and the constant juxtaposition between the dark and mature themes and the innocence of childhood to me was what made the book great.

And the book is a huge success, and knowing modern entertainment models, there is only one logical conclusion: make a movie out of it!

So how would you do it? Given around 2-hours of running time, what do you keep in, and what do you leave out?

The Swedish movie adaptation is a somewhat faithful adaptation of the novel, keeping most of the characters intact, while removing most of the more disturbing themes out of the movie. There was no mention of the satanic cult, nor was Eli’s origins really explained. There was one shot, however, with Oskar looking through the door and seeing the signs of his castration. This is probably my biggest complaint of the movie, as it was never explained or even talked about. This is an R-rated movie already, if you have decided to show that much, be more aggressive in what you want to show and do them all. Otherwise, just don’t show it at all, since it doesn’t benefit the story one bit anyway. But all in all, I like the movie quite a lot. It was shot well, and the acting was good I think. I could not comment much on the dialogues however, for I have no knowledge of the Swedish language at all, but to me at least every line sounds a bit monotone. (Also I am surprised at how similar is Swedish is to German, as I can catch a few words every line). I like the movie in general, as it is truly well made. I think it works much better as a romance story though, and I do not find it scary at all. There was no violence, and there was no gore, and I feel like this movie should not have been an R. But it is, and to me this is a substantial misstep in marketing.

This might be surprising, but I prefer the American remake to the Swedish original. To be very fair, after watching the Swedish original I realized that the remake has a lot of similarities with it, with some of the scenes almost shot-for-shot the same. Having said that, I prefer this version mainly due to the storytelling. The dark themes of the original novel was stripped down, with Ebby (the Eli in this version) being a girl instead of a castrated boy. To me the more streamlined story works better in movie form. What I like the most about this version is the characterization of the “father” character. In the novel as well as the original movie, he was a pedophile. In this version a picture found in their room showcased both Ebby and her “father” as children, making a point of them also falling in love when he was younger, thus creating parallel between him and Owen (Oskar). And because of this, the ending is not just a bittersweet moment, but has some even more disturbing implications, suggesting that Owen would eventually suffer the same fate. The movie for me thus became scary, and did what the original could not do for me. The chemistry between the leads are very good, and Chloe Grace Moretz’s acting I think is very good. I absolutely adore her from “(500) Days of Summer”, though I haven’t seen “Kick Ass” or the “Carrie” remake and currently have no plans to do so.

It might seem strange that I have criticized (somewhat) the original for not giving enough darker elements, while praising the remake for being simplified. While for me, it’s one way or the other. The remake was simple without interfering with the main story line, and save for perhaps the most loyal of the novel fans, everyone could understand it. The original, on the other hand, while still good, hinted at the darker themes without actually exploring it further, and to me it seems needless and confusing, and this is why I prefer the American remake, even though it is much more different from the original source material.

All in all, the novel as well as the two movie adaptations are very good. Heartfelt and creepy, this might be the best “falling in love” story disguised as a horror, or the other way around.

Crazy Mythologies: Thoughts on [Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes]

Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes: A No-Bullshit Guide to World Mythology is a non-fiction by Cory O’Brien. Through the use of humor and very up-to-date language, the book tells some of the most fundamental stories of different religions from different parts of the world, as well as some of the most fascinating and incredible ones.

It is only a book of less than 300 pages, and is truly a light read. It took me two days from start to finish, and really only spent 2-3 hours actually reading it. It is in part due to the short length of the book, but I think more importantly, the humor and style. I remember my roommate being constantly fascinated by how long and often I have laughed out loud when reading it, and it’s truly a delightful read. Even though the book does poke fun at a lot of the story elements that seem too ridiculous to modern readers, never once have I felt that he was being contemptuous or disrespectful to any of the religions, which I consider to be a very hard feat to do for something like this. Well, he was probably disrespectful to the Church of Scientology, but I guess they must have saw that coming. I mean, we’re talking about the guy that wrote Battlefield Earth.

The book would probably appeal better to people who already know something about the myths. Knowing how the stories were told in a mystical and serious manner for me created much contrast between the hippy and completely over-the-top telling of the book, and it was hilarious. And some of the other more obscure stories can be built upon the basic knowledge of the religions and mythologies, making the stories easier to comprehend and remember. Even for those who have no idea of the mythologies before reading this book (which shouldn’t be the case for the major mythologies) would be able to get a good grasp on the religions, as well as a good laugh. It is like not getting a reference in a movie, but still finding it funny.

I in particular, love the last chapter of the book, with its final creation myth: the Big Bang and evolution. It stressed the importance of a peaceful co-existence, not only between different religions but also between religion and science. It pointed out that just like religions, science is also based on “faith”: faith in the fundamental principles, which could not be systematically proven and without which science could not stand. Religions should not stand as opposing forces to one another, nor religion to science. The importance of mutual-understanding and respect is essential in modern times.

If there is anything negative to say about the book, is its very modern talk. Even though it is one of its major selling points, and what makes this book great, it does also limit its audience. I can not say for sure, but I feel like people over 50 might find it hard to comprehend what is funny about this book, or how is it educational. And in another 10 years, the rapid change of popular culture would probably make this book feel very dated. I do feel sad knowing that this book probably won’t last, but it is a valid trade-off and unique in this sense.

In the end, I think this book is very well worth its price (14 bucks) and 3 hours of your time. It is a lot of fun, and the myths stick so well, check it out if you are interested!