Walt Freitag

In Kristallnacht, the emotions and values of a single main character become the field of contention between four to six players, as they competitively narrate the character through a dreamlike ordeal over eight fifteen-minute episodes, ending with a climactic trial that determines what the character gains and loses from the experience. A unique system links it all together without a gamemaster. Story elements that players create during the first seven episodes become physical cards playable at the trial.

Kristallnacht

Within a few minutes of accidentally ingesting a minute dose of the synthetic neurotransmitter KR99, I began experiencing an extraordinary hallucination, or rather I should say a sequence of hallucinatory episodes. Apparently, as best as I can determine from examining the aftermath, I remained seated and motionless during the entire episode, which lasted eight hours by the clock but only two hours subjectively, as I did no damage to my person or to my surroundings despite undergoing subjective experiences that at times involved vigorous and violent activity. The episode began in the late evening, and as the clinic was closed for the night, I was alone and undisturbed the entire time.

As far as I can recall, the very first hallucinatory sensation was a tremendous sound of shattering glass, completely without warning and intolerably loud. A moment later, the visual hallucination began in kind, as my view of the office around me appeared to shatter like a pane of glass. In alarm I realized that a brick had been thrown through the large window fronting my office facing the street — though in fact my real office has no windows and connects only to a hospital corridor. “Outside” beyond the shattered glass was a nighttime street scene of shadowy running figures, confused shouts and screams, and as-yet distant fires. I soon recognized the scene from my grandmother’s stories of Berlin on the tenth of November 1938, Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. It was no doubt from these memories that my brain constructed the format — though not, of course, the detailed content — of the episodes that were to follow.

Almost immediately, a man broke into my office through the shattered window, and began shouting racist abuse at me. He was dressed in the garb of a brownshirt, complete with a swastika armband, and carrying a fire axe. His face and shrill voice were those of a recent patient of mine, at whose parole hearing I’d testified that his continued anti-Semitic ideation (including the full panoply of holocaust denial conspiracy theories) were indicative of a paranoid dissociative state rendering him not yet able to re-enter society. Shouting that he was paying me back for overcharging him at my stationery store (which my former medical office now seemed to have fully transformed into), he began smashing the store’s fixtures, tossing boxes of ink bottles to smash on the floor, and toppling shelves. I made no response, and eventually he turned his attention toward me and threatened violence. I resolved to defend myself and grabbed up a chair to keep him at bay. A burning torch was thrown through the window, setting fire to scattered papers on the floor. Meanwhile, I had managed to catch my assailant’s axe in the legs of the chair and was wrestling him for control of it. In the process his head was struck by the axe handle, hard enough to knock him cold. The fire was spreading, and the shouts of angry men were getting closer outside. I fled, leaving the man unconscious in the burning shop, but reaching the relative safety of an alley partway down the block, I changed my mind and resolved to rescue the man. Back at the shop, a gang of his brethren had arrived at the store and were already pulling him out to the sidewalk. They saw me and gave chase, and I fled again back toward the alley.

Fortunately the alley passed all the way through to an adjacent street, where I evaded my pursuers and hid, until another sudden crash of shattered glass disintegrated my hiding place and placed me suddenly in front of another broken store front. This turned out to be a delicatessen, whose proprietor was my sister, who in real life succumbed to anorexia while I was barely an adolescent. She ignored my attempts to rescue her, and insisted on attempting to serve meals demanded by a queue of shadowy customers even as mocking brownshirts tauntingly grabbed away her utensils and defiled the foodstuffs in the store. With superhuman strength she resisted my efforts to bodily drag her out of there. When she began slicing her own flesh to fill sandwiches, I went berserk and drove the customers away with my axe. This, at last, got her attention; she looked at me in horror and fled; I tried to chase after her, but my chase was cut short when I unaccountably ran straight into a pane of glass, whose loud shattering heralded another change of scene.

Thus began a nightmarish odyssey that took me through increasingly vivid and surreal experiences. I will not relate all, especially as some of the occurrences were of an even more intensely personal nature than what had gone before. Various scenes included my parents, my wife and children, my teachers, my medical colleagues, and my patients; others were cast entirely with strangers but incorporated snatches of my past and present life. Each interval ended with the sound of glass shattering, which I attribute to the hourly chiming of the clock in my office, the only significant sound in the room, distorted in my perception by the effects of the drug.

The final episode was of a different character than the others. I had been completely caught up in the hallucination since shortly after it began, but by the end of the second hour I was becoming more lucid, beginning to remember who and where I really was. Nonetheless the hallucination retained its grip, and I found myself at last caught and dragged away by the brown-shirted figures from whom I’d been fleeing all along. The final shattering of glass placed me in a sort of interrogation room. The interrogators were not the Nazis alone, though they were present; most were the same people, friend and foe, whom I’d encountered in the preceding scenes. They ringed me, just outside the pool of light in which I sat, and from time to time this or that figure would loom closer and make accusations or ask pointed questions. Some accusations I denied; others I felt compelled to confess to. It was deeply disturbing but not, oddly, entirely unwelcome, as I was by then lucid enough to perceive that through this trial I would regain reality. At that juncture, what was true and what was not seemed hardly relevant. Did I really break my parents’ hearts by marrying a gentile, and if so, is that my fault or theirs? Did I really tease my sister, when I was twelve and she was fifteen, about her figure? It all felt true, but not all of it was.

Though it would seem that any narrative ending with a trial (of sorts) must include a verdict, that is the one detail of the hallucination that I unfortunately cannot remember vividly, in fact, not at all. Two hours after that first din of broken glass, the midnight chiming of my office clock brought me fully back to myself.

Despite recent new evidence that KR99 may cause personality changes, neurochemical sequale (so-called ‘brain damage’), and even sudden death in rare cases, I don’t believe I’ve suffered any long-term effects from my own ordeal. It’s true that I no longer take pride in the prestige I’ve gained through my years of clinical practice, but is that not fully accounted for by the perspective of age and wisdom, and by the different nature of the new challenges I now face in my new career as an advocate for the rights of the mentally ill?

Eric Corson, M.D. Ph.D.