BERLIN (AFP).- A satirical board game played by dissidents in communist East Germany, "Burokratopoly", has been relaunched to teach students about life under the dictatorship that collapsed a quarter century ago.

The politically subversive game was based on "Monopoly" where players roll dice and use play money to buy houses, hotels and railway stations, an economic model the Soviet bloc condemned as "robber capitalism".

The game's underground version instead pokes fun at the path to power in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The goal is to rise from worker, farmer or soldier to chief of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany.

Players must use conformity, intrigue and connivance, as well as rigged elections and denunciations of rivals, to rise through the party and state bureaucracy while avoiding jail and the fangs of the omnipresent Stasi secret police.

The game was invented in the 1980s by civil rights activist Martin Boettger, a Christian pastor's son and trained physician who spent time in East German jails and who today, aged 67, is a local politician for the ecologist Greens party in the eastern town of Zwickau.

Presenting the relaunched version this week at a Berlin museum on life in the GDR, Boettger recalled how he would meet secretly with family and friends and explain the rules of the game.

"The main question I was asked was: 'How many years (prison) do you get for playing this game?'," he recalled in a newspaper interview.

The game was re-released as an educational tool for schools, complete with a multimedia online package of historical resources, to teach young people about the Marxist-Leninist regime that collapsed in 1989.

The aim of the project is to "convey history through playing", said Robert Rueckel, director of Berlin's DDR Museum (GDR Museum), which co-sponsors the project.

Boettger said he did not know until long after the fall of the Berlin Wall how widely the game had spread, as fellow opposition sympathisers made their own clandestine versions, some painted onto table cloths.

He said his aim in inventing the game was both to educate and to create some light relief "so that we do not drown in earnestness and sorrow".

To his knowledge, nobody was ever jailed for playing the game even though authorities were aware of it, he said in an online video interview.

In 2005 Boettger found a photocopy of "Burokratopoly" in his Stasi files, which had been released after Germany's 1990 reunification, together with the domestic spy agency's official assessment of the game.

It read: "The so-called board game Burokratopoly is a dice game with hostile and negative character which in an ironic way portrays alleged ways to gain and lose political power in the GDR and in this way shows contempt for social conditions."


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