GAMERAUSCH CINEGAMING: THE BERLIN APARTMENT

The game THE BERLIN APARTMENT (Blue Backpack Games, Germany 2025) tells the story of German history through the residents of a single (East) Berlin apartment over the course of several decades. As an episodic exploration game, it brings history to life through spaces, objects, and traces of everyday life, and addresses topics in an accessible way that have rarely been explored in this medium before. And it does so with a focus on the realities of life in East Germany that is unusually clear for a video game.
We’ll play selected chapters of the game live on the big screen and then speak with science fiction author Karlheinz Steinmüller, one of the genre’s most important East German representatives. He has not only researched the censorship of science fiction literature in the GDR but also experienced it firsthand. The game draws precisely on these experiences: One of its chapters tells the story of a fictional science fiction author in the GDR, inspired not least by Steinmüller’s own work. Together with him and the game’s developer, we’ll discuss memory, censorship, and the scope for storytelling within a totalitarian system.
In collaboration with the Bertelsmann Foundation and in cooperation with the Center for Artistic Research.