This is a letter I wrote to some students at some school near the center of the USA, because I learned that some of them were playing a board game. Not any board game, but a particular one. I'm leaving it here because it's probably not a bad thing if more people read this than just those students.
Hi!
You don't know me. My name is Jens – like “yes” with an extra “n”, and I'm from Germany I'm around your parents' age, or at least in that ballpark. People would put me right in between Gen X and Millennials, but because things are a bit different over here, it's probably better to think of me as Gen X.
I'm writing this because I've heard some of you have played a home-made game.
Think about that first. You play a game, one of the most innocent activities you can think of. And someone from all the way over in Germany thinks that's worth writing this. Don't we have anything better to do over here?
Yeah, we do... and no we don't. Life here isn't all that different from where you live. But what happened is one of the most important things I can think of, so of course that means I'll drop everything for a moment to write this.
See, that game wasn't particularly interesting. It was a riff on Monopoly. That's hardly the most interesting thing in the world. That game has been remade a gazillion times.
What's interesting is how precisely the game was modified. It didn't seem to change the rules at all, or at least not in any particularly significant way. It just changed the graphics and the wording into something deeply hateful, related to our German history.
You know what I'm talking about, right?
So let's jump right in.
You know the Nazis as inexplicably well-dressed but rather single-minded, not very bright villains. They may be a bit shouty. From movies to comic books to video games, the image of the Nazi is largely the same.
You may kind of fear them, because they're obviously bad. But mostly you punch or kill them, because you're better.
Well, I know them as grandpa.
That is, I don't know him. He was shot by you. Americans. Not you, personally, of course. I'm not even sure if it was one of your grandparents or great-grandparents. Who knows where in your country the person that pulled the trigger came from?
So I want to tell you a little bit about my grandfather.
See, we had two kinds of Nazis in Germany. One kind of Nazi knew precisely what was going on, and didn't care. They put their own benefit before everyone else, and simply accepted that their actions would cause suffering. The other kind of Nazi didn't know so well, but went along because they had little choice.
Every time people talk about “two kinds”, they simplify. Reality is more complex, so it's better to talk about a spectrum: on one end, you can imagine Hitler, Goebbels, and the Nazis who didn't care about suffering. And on the other end you can put those who didn't know anything and just went along.
I don't really know where my grandfather was on that spectrum.
What I do know is that he wasn't particularly politically engaged when he was in Germany. He was a radio engineer. And since the army uses radios to communicate, they need people to operate and maintain those. So when the war broke out, my grandfather was sent to help out.
He didn't have a uniform. He didn't have a weapon. Neither was given to him. There were no such things to spare on mere radio engineers.
He got sent away first to Poland, then to France. We know a little of what happened, because Germany at that time had a fantastic postal system. He wrote letters to my grandmother, somewhere between every two or three days, or two or three daily. And they all arrived fast. Sometimes they managed to reply to each other's letter from the same day's morning. Sometimes their replies crossed each other, and it created confusion. You know, when in your chat group people talk over each other. Sometimes you have to figure out what the conversation actually is.
The postal system also allowed sending packages, and my grandparents used that. They had to. Because my grandfather did not get any equipment from the German military. So when the weather grew colder, he'd ask for a sweater to be sent, or some such.
Most amazingly, people exchanged food in those packages. If he could buy a cabbage in France, and in Germany there were apples, they'd swap food to feed their kids better.
I know all this, because my grandmother kept every letter he sent. He could not keep the replies; there were too many to carry. So he burned them. What we, the children and grandchildren have left, is one side of the conversation. His side.
By all accounts, he was a nice guy. Between organizing what to send where, he wrote a little bit about his job – at one point, he had some difficulty getting parts for a radio, and he related that. And the rest of the writing is essentially love letters. He wrote how much he misses and loves my grandmother, and their children.
There is nothing much political in those letters. That's not because he had no opinions, but because the letters were censored. If he'd written anything that could give the enemy strategic information if they'd intercepted a post delivery, that could not be sent.
So when it comes to the war efforts, we know little of his involvement. At one point he had my grandmother buy a handgun from an acquaintance, and ship it over. He felt safer with a weapon. He practised a little, but since he wasn't given any ammunition, there was little for him to do with it.
Very late in the war, we know he was stationed somewhere where the allies – the British, I think – flew attacks. The soldiers had left, so it was up to him and his fellow engineers to use the anti-aircraft guns. I have no idea if they hit anything. It can't have been a very important event, otherwise we'd know more about it from history books.
And then the war was over, and he was found in one of the mass graveyards in France. We can dig up from history books that most people in that graveyard were killed by American forces, but no details are known.
I'm writing this to tell you just how different this is from shouty men in sharp uniforms bellowing harsh orders in a gibberish language. My grandfather was just a guy.
I don't know what he was thinking. When he wrote anything at all about politics, it was one of two things: either he expressed fear and anger towards the Bolsheviks. I'm not going into history here, but if you think of them as largely equivalent to the “commies” your older generations might complain about, you aren't far off.
Or he expressed resentment that the allies decided to invade Germany, and he was forced to take up arms to defend his country.
Let that sit a moment.
He claimed Germany was fighting a defensive war. History states that it invaded its surrounding countries.
I don't know if he was ever aware how Hitler sent German soldiers dressed up in Polish uniforms into Poland, to then attack Germany from the Polish side. The entire propaganda platform for Hitler's expansion of Germany was that we were being attacked and had to defend ourselves.
The irony of defending the German border in southern France was probably lost on my grandfather. One hopes, because the alternative is worse.
So here we are, left with a regular guy, who loved his wife and kids, and spent a lot of his time organizing how to feed them well from afar. Who, by all accounts had a tenuous grasp on the politics of the world, but chose to believe some narrative of it.
Why did he make that choice? The same reason any of us believe anything: we want to be the heroes of our own stories.
Knowing we did something bad feels terrible. We use all kinds of methods to avoid thinking about it. Some people drink, or take drugs. Speaking about it feels like rubbing salt into a raw wound.
There are only three ways out of this: either you suppress it, which is what the drink and silence do. Except that this doesn't work. Sure, you don't have to confront your past, but it spills out in nasty ways. Maybe you take it out on other folk. Like the Bolsheviks.
Or you rewrite the facts so that what you're doing is actually inevitable. You had no choice. Or you may even be somewhat heroic, because you're making difficult choices. Like defending your country.
Finally, you can suck it up, accept that you messed up, and make the choice that from this day forward, you're doing two things: at minimum, you're not making the same mistake again. And if you can, you'll try to do something that goes towards repairing it.
The repairing was left to my grandmother. She spent most of her life helping others. First by raising her children alone; she never remarried. Then by working tirelessly in her church community. My grandfather died too young for us to know if he would have ever gotten around to that.
None of this story seems to have anything to do with that game that some of you played, right?
Well, it does. I’m getting there.
Did you know why Nazi Germany was also called the Third Reich (Reich means “empire”)? Because the Nazis admired the Romans.
The first empire was, well, what we think of as the Roman empire (It split up later, so that's not really helpful, but never mind details. They're not important in propaganda.)
Then, German kings unified a large portion of central Europe in the middle ages, and in order to cement their position, they used the Catholic church – in Rome – to sanctify it. This is the second empire, the so-called Holy Roman Empire of German Nations.
The Third Reich is Hitler's attempt to recapture the glory of the first and second empire. To make Germany great again!
He felt he had to do this, because Germany wasn't doing so well in the first world war, and didn't have as many colonies as other European nations. It's a real case of collective ... equipment envy. Because German men fell … short ... it seemed necessary to beat up the rest of Europe, as any half “decent” schoolyard bully would do.
I wish power politics were deeper and more complex than that.
Not all politics are power politics. Becoming active to e.g. help secure funds for your local sports team, because it provides a good focus for the community to come together is a deeply political act. It may even feel good to succeed, because people praise you for your success.
Power politics is all about the reward, though. It's not about what you actually accomplish. And so accomplishing anything actually becomes a distraction. If the only thing that counts is what you gain, then it's best to pour what strength you have into maximizing the result for yourself.
It's all appearances, with just enough substance to keep your supporters happy enough, but hungry for more. You can't have real success. If you had real success, your supporters would have what they need. And then they don't need to support you any longer.
Power politics. Hitler was all about that.
He wasn't stupid, though, and in his glorification of the Roman empire, he also learned something: divide et impera. This is Latin, for “divide and conquer”.
It's a classic power politics move: in order to gain influence over part of the population, you split it off from the rest. You divide the population.
How you do that can change. The Romans liked to identify influential people, and give them gifts and military support. That's not unlike some Western countries do in the rest of the world. We may even prop up dictators if it suits us.
The point is that with this support, the influential locals can cement their influence. That'll be sure to anger some folk, and your division has started. It's best not to be too overt in your support at this stage, because people can then be angry with other locals rather than you. So now there are arguments and fighting breaking out.
You keep doing this, until the situation is sufficiently volatile. Then you can officially move in with your troops, and claim that you're just there to keep the peace as a neutral party. You have no stake in anything, other than to protect all the innocent bystanders.
Another method to create division is to spread lies. First, you need to identify groups of people that see themselves as somewhat different from each other. Skin colour is a good one, because it's easy to distinguish by even the thickest of observers. Wealth is another good one: people can either flaunt it, or they can't.
But there really are a million dividing lines. In the USA, when I've visited in the past, I heard someone refer to “flyover country”. In their view, everything that mattered either happened on the East or West coasts. Everything in the middle was just the stuff you flew over from one important part to another.
How does that make you feel?
Annoyed, unhappy, upset?
That's fantastic! Which means with two small words, “flyover country”, I have divided you. I, a random German, have managed to divide the great United States.
Of course, it's not quite that simple. These words have to be repeated, otherwise you'll forget them, shrug off the frustration. It may already be over for you. But hear them often enough, and the division stays.
I mentioned lies earlier. There is, of course, a lie in those words. The simplest to identify is that much of that “flyover country” is farmland. This “flyover country” feeds the East and West. Without it, the “important” parts couldn't be sustained. What's more important, then, you guys or the coasts?
Did I stir some pride, even a tiny amount? Great! Because now you accept the division. Maybe not completely, and maybe not all of you. And again, you may forget about it. But rather than being annoyed at some dude using stupid words to describe you, you take those words and make them your own, so you can have pride again.
We're all the heroes of our own stories. Because that's what people do: we take something, and retell it in just the right way so we feel good about it.
In this case, there is truth buried beneath. Most political power in your country is concentrated at the coasts. There is better education there. There is more wealth there. That cannot be an easy thing to observe. Everyone around the world knows New York or Los Angeles, but who knows your town? Your school?
What's not true is that this makes your surroundings any less important. But you don't get the praise for it that you deserve. So that becomes a story in your mind where you're the victim of some unfairness. You can have pride, you should have pride, and it's the others who are not getting it.
Humans are masters at telling themselves this kind of story. Everything we experience becomes a story in our heads. It's how we remember and understand what we remember, and that's why we're so good at storytelling.
The brain is evolved to do this. Depending on circumstance and temperament, we can either use these stories of unfairness to accept our lot, or to fight back. We feed on stories in order to get through the day.
Which is to say that there is not much shame in letting yourselves get divided. The stories are just that powerful.
Do you know what the most insidious division is? Boys versus girls.
We all know we're different from each other. Sure, boys tend to be taller and stronger, on average. There clearly are differences.
You know what's the same? We each tell ourselves stories to deal with this.
The boys' story includes that girls are essentially useless. They can't drive well, they're bad at science, they need to be protected.
The girls' story includes that boys are essentially useless. They can't think with their head, they are violent, they need to be led so they don't harm themselves.
Do you think that this is true?
It isn't... and it is. This is what we call a self-fulfilling prophecy. You grew up with these stories, or stories like them. They keep getting repeated at you. They're a very, very strong narrative that you can't help but believe, because this narrative reframes every single one of your failures into a strength.
Boys being better with cars and machines means they're good at doing. Action is good. Weak people overthink stuff.
Girls being better at social things means they're good at leading. They're in control, secretly. Stupid people act without thinking. They don't even know they're being controlled.
When you see boys acting like boys and girls acting like girls, it's not all about how some are statistically stronger or shorter. A lot of why we all do what we do is because of the stories we've been telling about boys and girls for generations.
These stories are so deep seated that it's actually impossible for the brightest minds to figure out precisely which parts of boys' behaviour is inborn, and which parts of girls' behaviour is due to the stories (and vice versa). The best guess is 50-50, which isn't really 50% at all – it's just what you say when you don't know.
Getting divided by stories is something we can't fully avoid. There is no shame in it.
But when the story is obviously wrong? When the story hurts you, or your friends? What then?
Then we go back to our three options: we either suppress, or we tell another story to cover up the one we don't like. Or... we change it.
That last option is the hardest one. Sometimes it's inevitable, because all others are worse. That's when we get examples of women excelling at “men's things” and vice versa, like female soldiers and male nurses. When suppression and evasion don't work, the only way through is to prove the story wrong.
So why accept stories that divide you?
Division always hurts you. The boys vs. girls thing, well, it hurts every teenager at some point. I'm not going into that, you'll all feel this much more strongly than me. Even if it’s just down to “I don’t know how to talk to that person”.
You accept the story – we accept the story – because the narrative gives you just enough to make you feel good that it's easier to hang on to it than to prove it wrong.
That's it. That is all it is.
That is all there is to other divisive stories, like the flyover vs. coast thing, or the skin colour story.
One of the hardest stories to avoid is one that doesn't take itself seriously. That's just a joke. Nobody takes it seriously.
Which means nobody asks questions about it. Not openly, not to themselves.
The vast majority of girls vs. boys stories you'll have heard were likely told as a joke. If not, they might have been told kindly: “they can't help being who they are”.
Or, they might have been told in anger.
We believe stories best when we react emotionally. We stop thinking about them. We just absorb them, little by little, until we think they're truths.
Which is why divisive stories are so effective. If we laugh, or pity, or are angry with some other group of people, we don't even ask whether it's actually right to divide folk into us and them. We just laugh, or pity, or are angry. The division slips right in without us noticing.
If you made it this far, here's the important thing. From that story about my grandfather through the three Roman empires and flyover country, right to boys and girls:
Pay attention to stories that divide you.
There is always, always a power politics player that wins.
You forgot about that one, didn't you? That means it ain't you.
So now you have three options…
See, I’m very angry that the country that was so instrumental in liberating Germany from Hitler has gotten to the point that kids play games that celebrate the kind of thing we needed liberation from. It genuinely hurts.
But I can’t be angry at you for believing stories you’ve heard your entire life. I can’t be angry at you for telling yourselves stories that make you feel better. I can’t be angry at turning those into a game.
If I put myself here and shame you for what you’ve done, all I’m going to do is make you feel bad. You’re going to tell yourself a story to fix that; something about how my opinion doesn’t matter, for some reason or another. At best, you’ll just move on. And at worst, I’ve helped create more division in the world.
No, what I’d like you to understand is that option number three – to suck it up and become better – is the only thing that will free you.
That’s what it means to grow up, you know? A lot of adults haven’t learned this, either. Because we don’t really know how to teach this. At least it’s very hard to do, and easy to fail at.
It’s easy to punish you for being bad. And it’s still relatively easy to praise you for being good. But explaining how to become good, well…
That’s something everyone figures out for themselves.
We have examples, and stories that help, but no rule or formula. It’s not that rules don’t exist. We have them, from the bible to laws to what your parents said. But there will always be situations where those rules don’t seem to fit. Or where they fit, but they’re really bad for you.
Between the rules and stories, the praise and the punishment, it’s still up to you to figure out the way.
You don’t figure out the way by trying to forget it’s there, or by going the opposite direction. So only the third option remains. Suck it up and move forward. Try with every step to be better, or at least not worse.
So, no, I have no intention of shaming you for being human. Instead I’m telling you all of this because… I actually believe you’ve got this!
Because you can start really small. This whole thing about being better: it’s not about being the best, immediately. It’s really just about every tiny step.
And one small step is to stop playing stupid games full of hateful imagery. It doesn’t even cost you anything, other than to admit it wasn’t your best moment. Stings a little, but that’s about it.
You keep doing that, taking such small steps. It’s a habit, that grows like a muscle. Use it more, and you can do heavier things soon enough. Not every day, not always, but on average.
You’ll see.