„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.
Silver's blog 