Rosenstrasse is an elegaic, immersive historical role-playing game for four players and one facilitator. It explores marriages between Jewish and “Aryan” Germans in Berlin between 1933 and 1943, and culminates in the eponymous women-led protests. Each player takes the role of two characters, at least one of whom is Jewish and at least one of whom is female. As a result, players experience this story of persecution and resistance from multiple perspectives.
One challenge of Holocaust media is that it often flattens Jewish lives into a single story of victimhood. Not only does this dishonor the complexity of Jewish lives, it also allows non-Jews to implicitly cast themselves as the heroic saviors of the helpless Jewish people. Rosenstrasse seeks to brush history “against the grain,” recovering the lesser-known stories of women during wartime. However, focusing only on the women of the Rosenstrasse story would play into the dominant narrative of the non-Jewish rescuer, when in fact the vast majority of Germans were either complicit with or actively participating in the Nazi regime. By requiring every player to have two characters, one a Jewish man and one a protesting woman, we were able to focus on the heroism of the women while still centering Jewish voices.
Previous research on Holocaust education games has shown that while such games have potential, they also risk trivializing the Holocaust, or having players learn the wrong things from the experience. We have therefore playtested our game with over 150 players in five countries, including a formal qualitative research study with 18 subjects. Our players have included both professional historians and educators, and people who previously believed the Holocaust was a hoax; both expert role-players and novice gamers; both the descendants of Holocaust survivors, and the descendants of perpetrators and collaborators.