Lilac Song

I’m hoping that by the end of the Review-a-Thon, someone will write up Lilac Song without having played Social Democracy; it’s impossible for me to view it as anything other than a coda to that earlier game, but I’m intensely curious what someone unaware of the save-the-Weimar-Republic strategy hit of 2024 would make of it. Unlike that Brobdingnagian triumph, Lilac Song is relatively slight; it’s a short choice-based work where you play a servant puttering around in the household of Otto Braun, the chief executive of the German state of Prussia. The main thing to do is consider making some tweaks to a board game you’re developing to explore the highly dynamic political situation, but before you can spend much time on that hobby the newspaper arrives, announcing a right-wing power play of the kind you’ve spent so much time anticipating via your game.

The game, of course, is an analog version of Social Democracy, a tool the protagonist is using to try to understand the threat Weimar’s enemies pose, and how, if at all, they can be stopped. But while SD’s pleasures are all about exploring a confidently-presented simulation, these segments in Lilac Song are all about anxiety – you fret about your assumptions, consider making changes to the numbers and then second-guess yourself, growing increasingly worried that these simplified mechanics mask the way you’ve piled one uncertainty atop another…

There’s a reading of Lilac Song where it’s simply about the anxiety of authority, an attempt to draw back the curtain on a game that broke containment and surely had some of its players feeling sure they could have beaten the Nazis after playing it a couple of times. And sure, that’s part of what’s going on, but I don’t think that exhausts what the LS has to offer, slight as it is.

For one thing, it humanizes the grand sweep of history dramatized by SD. In addition to futzing with the game, you can listen to music or look at some art, which provides some texture to the cultural blossoming wiped away by the Nazi’s reactionary aesthetics. So, a fortiori, does the identity of the protagonist – though the century-old words and concepts she uses are of course different, she’s a trans woman who’s managed to achieve a life with some dignity, due to the liberalization of Weimar’s science and politics. But beyond clarifying the stakes, this zooming-in to the personal level is also a reminder that history is not a bloodless game. The climactic scene sees the protagonist begging Braun – whose ability to leverage Prussia as an independent power base makes him a very impactful presence in games of SD – to take action to oppose this right-wing overreach. But Braun is old and tired, and much as the protagonist dithers over the stats on her game-pieces, he lacks the courage of his convictions:

Otto shakes his head. “The police will obey the constitutional authorities. We do not have the legitimacy to order the police against the Reich government.”

“Then what were all the Republican purges and hires for?”

“To defend the constitution against those who would overthrow it, as you are suggesting now.”

It’s not hard to detect here the voice of certain accommodationists quick to reconcile themselves to Trump’s second electoral victory, or just those too worn out by a decade of resistance to haul themselves off the mat to do it all over again. As Yeats wrote of the apocalypse, “the best lack all conviction/while the worst are full of passionate intensity” – analysis, intelligence, empathy can all feel feeble against the brute action of the fascist.

One could swerve to find completely different resonances with the modern world, though: the warning that even a sophisticated simulation is at best a series of guesses, weighting uncertainties towards an outcome that seems plausible given all that’s come before but might not be able to adapt to fundamentally changed circumstances is also resonant in an age where an increasing number of people view LLMs as oracles (I was in a meeting last week where a colleague said that many of her friends asked ChatGPT how they should vote in our recent primary election).

Lilac Song provokes a lot of reflections, it’s fair to say – and it’s a mirror rather than an oracle, providing no answers to the myriad questions to provokes. But that’s very much the province of art, which is more valuable when creating ambiguities than creating certainties, and always insisting on the human.