Matthew Kam, an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, speaks about his recent doctoral dissertation research in Indian communities and designing E-Learning games for children from other cultural backgrounds. His MILLEE (Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies) project was funded by the National Science Foundation and has won several awards, including one from the MacArthur Foundation.

Babbel Blog: Why do you think E-Learning games on cell phones can provide a learning benefit?

MK: The case for games for education has been made from two very different angles. One would be the theoretical angle, the other the empirical angle. From the theoretical point of view, educational researchers like James Paul Gee argued that games could incorporate very good educational principles. There have been studies on the empirical level which support this claim. The most useful study that we found was done by a team of MIT economists who studied a group of children from the urban slums in India – more than 10,000 slum children were involved in that experiment carried out over more than two years. They found that kids playing mathematical E-Learning games two times per week improved their scores on math tests. That was by far the strongest evidence so far that games have an impact for education. We thought, when mathematical games can make a difference, you should be able to achieve the same kind of benefits with language-learning games too. That is the whole motivation behind our game-based approach.

B: You started nearly five years ago with your visits to India. How did you get there?

In 2004 I got to know the work of a visiting professor at Berkeley, Dr. Urvashi Sahni, who has spent years working on initiatives to empower disadvantaged learners in India, in both villages and slums. I was pretty impressed by her work and wanted to examine how to introduce more sophisticated technologies into the equation.

Matthew Kam

B: You wrote in your dissertation, that the children in the villages have a lower level of familiarity with technology than the kids in the slums. Can you describe this difference?

In the rural areas there might be some exposure to technologies like refrigerators, light and even cell phones. Village kids don’t often use the phones of their parents; and when they do, it is usually the boys who get to use the phones, and parents are reluctant to let their daughters use them. In urban slums the level of technology is higher and the level of usage of cell phones, like SMS, is also more prevalent. The exposure to higher forms of technology like computers gives the children there a stronger foundation to use the cell phone applications we had developed for them.

B: Learning English in India is very important  to have access to better jobs, white collar jobs. How many people speak English in India?

The numbers vary a lot; one source I quoted in my dissertation speaks of five percent of the country knowing English well enough to be part of that elite.

B: You wrote about how the games of the Indian village kids differ from games Western children play. Please explain this.

We were halfway into the project when we realized that the earlier games we developed were not really making sense to the Indian children. That was when we decided to take a step back and try to understand what  the unique characteristics of their village games were and how they differ from contemporary western games. In arcade-type games, for example, the way to increase the difficulty level is to introduce more enemy characters at a higher level or have the enemies move faster at a higher level of difficulty. The challenges of those approaches are not applicable to the traditional games Indian village children play. That is because when they play a game among themselves on the playground, the numbers of human players are fixed. So there is no way to introduce more opponents. Similarly,, there is a human limit to how fast a human can run. We finally realized that one of the most common approach these traditional games use to increase difficulty is to introduce sub-goals, like having players move to certain locations on the playground and touch them.

B: How does your software work?

In our case, the cell phone application we developed for English learning comprises of several screens. First, to introduce the language to the kids: Things like English words, new sentence structures, as well as learning to put words together and construct sentences. And we have some screens, which test the children on their knowledge of English; for example they have to match the word with the right picture or spell various words. In most cases we try to make use of fun games. We might have a game that tries to teach the various ways for fruits. So we have each tree that represents a type of fruit and the player has to get to a certain tree to gather the correct fruit. We introduce challenges and other gameplay elements, which are standard design principles for making video games interesting to play.

B: Could this games work as a standalone approach or have teachers to be involved?

E-Learning needs to be complemented by other sources of learning. But in some of these developing regions it is difficult to get kids to school on a regular basis, because they are engaged in farming, housework or they generate income for the household – what you call child labor. If you use mobile devices like cell phones, you make some of the learning resources accessible outside the school settings. What we’re trying to do is to provide some of the foundations of English, like basic vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. When the children have that foundation, they will be better equipped to engage in a conversation with humans. That is where the real language learning, at least in a more advanced form, happens.

B: Are your games only text-based or are you using audio, too?

We use a combination of both modality; our focus is on written English as well as conversational. When we cover the latter, we expose the learner to the spoken form of the language through audio.

B: How is the technological infrastructure in India? And who can pay for a cell phone?

Even though connectivity is a problem in some rural areas in India, the bigger problem is the cost of air time, which it is very expensive for the rural families. That is why our games don’t require airtime. Electricity is not a serious problem either, at least not in the areas we conduct our studies. The real problem is, electricity comes at very irregular hours. Coming to the cost issue of the cell phones, I think that is the biggest challenge. There are two ways to address it: One way is to think about what is the lowest common denominator for a cell phone platform in order to make it possible to run language learning games. I think we can make a convincing case to cell phone manufacturers, that if they want to be part of rural education, these would be the features they have to support. I am pretty sure they could get the price point down to a certain level. What is more complicated: Get the manufactures, wireless carriers and governments to come on board to look into joint financing schemes. That is why a huge emphasis of the MILLEE project is to come up with credible learning results, that we can take to show policy makers that cell phone learning can make a difference.

B: What is next for your project?

We need to hand over the technology to the local communities to run them for themselves. And we have to encourage the kids to play the games to learn English when there are no pilot personnel around to supervise them. We have commenced such a study in the beginning of 2009, which is still ongoing at the time of writing.

When visiting these places, a translator could definitely come in handy. There is a new iPhone app which could have been a wonderful solution, but it comes with a catch: The iSpeak application ($2 for each language) offers translation from English to Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Swedish and vise versa – you type in a sentence, and it translates it and “speaks” the translation out for you. The only problem is that iSpeak relies on the Google translation engine – meaning you have to be connected to the internet. Which you may not be as a tourist without a contract with a local provider (or without wireless/WLAN, near the Victoria Falls for example).

Not such a bad idea to broaden your target group by teaching them the language you are broadcasting in, right? The British Broadcasting Company – BBC – offers several services to learn and improve your English. Besides the  “The Teacher” videos – who is in his own words “a very interesting and intelligent man” explaining idioms on a whiteboard -  there are episodes of “The Flatmates“, among other things. This programme offers you a new dialogue to listen to every week (mp3) along with background information on some terms related to the show’s subject, e.g. the economic crisis. You can take part in a quiz or vote for what happens next.

The Victoria University press office speaks of Sulzberger’s work as a “revolutionary approach” – but isn’t being exposed a language and learning it bit by bit the most well known way to learn a language anyhow?

Babbel Blog’s Interview with Frank Schüler und Matthias Hornberger of Kizoo, a Babbel investor. Schüler is Kizoo’s president and was managing director of subsidiaries of Web.de; Hornberger is Kizoo’s CFO and responsible for Finance, Controlling, Investor Relations & Corporate Affairs. (For the original German version click here)

When did you first hear about the “internet”?

Frank Schüler:

In business terms it was around 1995. We probably all figured out what roll the internet was going to play at the university. For me personally, in ‘91 and ‘92, it was a communication tool between universities. I myself was in New York then, and at the time the internet was already an important communication tool with people back home.

Matthias Hornberger:

For me it was in the second half of the 90s. It was already in the professional world as a communiation tool, though I only realized much later its range of possibilities in an information-based world and in applications. The Greve brothers, the founders of web.de, recognized this potential in the first half of the 90s, focusing their young business on this 100% and staking their first claims. Those were domains like web.de, flug.de, lastminute.de. In those years of entrepreneurial acitivity, sustainable business models were built on those. Web 1.0, as you would say today.

M. Hornberger

After selling web.de in 2005, you tried to establish ComBOTS as a kind of messenger web application – why didn’t it work out?

Hornberger:

It was a very aggressive attempt to newly define communication, to provide a completely new communication experience for the user. As was evident, the user – and in the end the customer is king – didn’t accept it in this way or didn’t depend on it so much. It’s hard to say if we just came up with it too early or if our approach was wrong in some aspects. In any case one has to admit the product didn’t pick up as much momentum as we had hoped.

Schüler:

F. Schüler

We stressed privacy a lot. You could safely exchange data – communication data but also multi-media data – on a one-to-one basis. In reality, without even thinking about privacy, users uploaded very compromising pictures to their social networks. They didn’t consider privacy important at all.

After ComBOTS ended in 2007, Kizoo – Technology Ventures – was founded in May 2008. How did you find Babbel?

Hornberger:

Amazingly Babbel was a cold call – in May 2008 Mr. Heine came right in to our Investor Relations Department: “You do investments – we have a good story”. We did all the talking really quickly and made the thing happen together with the IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft Berlin as a co-investor. Contact to transaction occurred in less than two months. That is an extremely short amount of time for a venture capital project like this.

What convinced you?

Hornberger:

First at all, the team. We believe that that’s what matters most: Better a brilliant team with a maybe not so seasoned project than the other way around. Second: The business model, especially the market segment that Babbel chose, because it”s flexible, internationalization is possible and it is very oriented toward the future. Learning languages is a universal subject and steadily gaining importance. It is a human necessity. In internet jargon it’s „sticky” – long lasting.

The core team at Babbel came from the Berlin-based music software producer Native Instruments – did that influence your decision?

Schüler:

Native Instruments wasn’t really important to us per se, rather the team’s experience with it, since it gave them their first entrepreneurial responsibiliy. You could see it in how they presented themselves: Very authentic and very professional

Hornberger:

All questions were answered very precisely, they delivered every time. They had good “expectation management”: They never built up expectations that they couldn’t follow through on. At the end of the day, in business relations you have to trust each other, and this trust occurs in the first talks. From a professional perspective it fit, but we had good chemistry, too.

How many users do you expect to pay a „premium service” at Babbel?

Schüler:

Basically it doesn’t matter so much. More important is that the the core idea be commercialized. When you think of phrasebooks, language courses or language tours that people feel natural about paying for, it seems normal enough for us.

But are users willing to spend money for internet services?

Hornberger:

Unlinke e-mail-services or access to information, professional language learning has always been paid for. Since school it is normal to pay for it; you pay hundreds of Euros for a pack of CDs from Langenscheid (German dictionary) – we believe that this is what’s going to make it easier to implement paid services.

Schüler:

In the end we rely on our own experience. We generated growth with a free service, the freemail product Web.de. We later introduced a members’ product and everybody asked, why would anyone pay for this? In the end we found many people who were willing to and are still glad to pay for it. The crucial thing is for the basic concept to be able to grow on an international basis, to get to big numbers. Then a small percentage chosing premium service is enough. And that is what we expect of Babbel.

Does such a model only work in the educational sector?

Hornberger:

Babbel’s approach: oriented around entertainement, with a huge fun-factor, a lot of multimedia with pictures and audio – this approach works in other learning and education sectors. In this respect the model is flexible enough to expand to other content – Babbel’s technical know-how was a strong argument for our investment.

What kind of investment opportunities is Kizoo looking for?

Hornberger:

There are still interesting segments of the internet. Even with Google – search is still interesting, games are an exiting field, and learning, beyond languages, is even another subject. Communities are on the downward slope, the market is saturated and the ad-based business model can’t sustain itself. But we hope to see ideas that no one’s thought of yet, particularly in mobile applications. Even Google and Amazon were rejected by investors in their early stages. We don’t want to have a similar missed opportunity in ten years, that is why we have to look a lot and closely…

What is the impact of the economic crisis on internet investments?

Hornberger

For the start-up phase it doesn’t mean that much, because turnover and credit financing are at more or less zero. But it has an impact on the venture capital market. Money that was slated for certain things isn’t there. On a whole the psychology is quite defensive at the moment. But compared to the housing market or the auto industry, the internet investment sector as a risk is negligible: Web 2.0 doesn’t need a public safety net. There will be good deals in 2009. But exits will certainly be harder.

Last question: Are you learning any languages?

Schüler:

I am learning Spanish at Babbel.

Hornberger:

I am learning the language that is least learned at Babbel: Italian. I love the dramatic sound of the language, but I haven’t gotten far yet. But Babbel motivates me regularly via email.

(Translation: Mara)

For the english translation click here.

Interview mit Frank Schüler und Matthias Hornberger von Kizoo, einem der Investoren hinter Babbel. Schüler ist Kizoo-President und war zuvor bei Web.de als Geschäfsführer einiger Tochterfirmen tätig. Hornberger ist als CFO für Finanzen, Controlling, Investor Relations & Corporate Affairs bei Kizoo verantwortlich.

Wann haben sie das erste Mal vom Internet gehört?

Frank Schüler:

Der Anfang der unternehmerischen Auseinandersetzung mit dem Internet wird so um 1995 gewesen sein. Dass das Internet eine Rolle spielt, hat wahrscheinlich jeder von uns schon im universitären Umfeld erfahren. Für mich persönlich war das 91/92 ein Kommunikationsprodukt zwischen Universitäten. Ich selber war in New York  an der Universität – da war das Internet das schon das wichtigste Kommunikationstool mit den Daheimgebliebenen.

Matthias Hornberger:

Bei mir war das in der zweiten Hälfte der 90er Jahre, schon im beruflichen Umfeld, zunächst auch als Kommunikationsinstrument.

Die Weite der Anwendungsmöglichkeiten in der Informationswelt und Applikationen hab ich in der Tat viel später erkannt. Die Brüder Greve, die Gründer von Web.de, haben  das  das Potential schon in der ersten Hälfte der 90er Jahren gesehen, ihr junges Unternehmen zu 100% darauf ausgerichtet und die ersten Claims abgesteckt . Das waren damals die Domains wie web.de, flug.de, lastminute.de. Darauf hat man in Jahren unternehmerischer Tätigkeit tragfähige Geschäftsmodelle aufgebaut. Das Web 1.0 würde man heute sagen.

M. Hornberger

Nach dem Verkauf von Web.de im Jahr 2005 haben sie versucht mit ComBOTS einen Messenger-ähnliches Netzprodukt zu etablieren – warum hat das nicht funktioniert?

Hornberger:

Es war ein sehr offensiver Ansatz Kommunikation neu zu definieren, für die User eine ganz neue Kommunikationserfahrung herzustellen. Wie sich gezeigt hat der User – und der Kunde ist am Ende König – das in der Form nicht akzeptiert oder in dem Maße nicht angewandt. Es ist jetzt schwer zu sagen, ob wir einfach zu früh waren oder ob unser Ansatz zum Teil nicht der richtige war. In jedem Fall muss man konstatieren, dass das Produkt sich nicht so massenhaft durchgesetzt hat, wie wir das geplant haben.

Schüler:

F. Schüler

Wir hatten eine beondere Betonung auf Privatsphäre gelegt; in der man dann wirklich in einem gesicherten Umfeld in 1-zu-1 Beziehung, Daten – Kommunikations-, aber auch Mediadaten -austauschen konnte. Tatsächlich haben die User gleichzeitig völlig losgelöst von Privatsphären-Erwägungen höchst kompromittierende Bilder freimütig in ihre Social Networks hochgeladen und damit letztlich in dieser Phase die Privatsphäre in deren Handeln überhaupt nicht als etwas Wichtiges erachtet.

Nach dem Ende von Combots 2007 haben sie im Mai 2008 unter dem Claim „Technology Ventures“ Kizoo gegründet. Wie sind sie auf Babbel gestoßen?

Hornberger:

Erstaunlicherweise war Babbel ein Cold Call – Herr Heine ist gleich im Mai 2008 auf uns unsere Investor Relations-Abteilung zugekommen: „Ihr macht Investments – wir haben hier eine gute Story“. Wir haben dann wirklich mit einem hohen Tempo die Gespräche geführt und das Ganze gemeinsam mit der IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft Berlin als Co-Investor realisiert.Vom Zeitpunkt der Kontaktaufnahme bis zum Abschluss der Transaktion vergingen nur knapp zwei Monate. Das ist eine extrem geringe Durchlaufzeit für ein derartiges Venture Capital Projekt.

Was hat sie denn überzeugt?

Hornberger:

Vorneweg das Team. Wir glauben, dass es zuvorderst darauf ankommt: Besser ein brillantes Team mit einem vielleicht nicht ganz ausgereiften Produkt als umgekehrt. Zum zweiten:  Das Geschäftsmodell bzw. das Marktsegment, das Babbel sich ausgesucht hat: Weil es Flexibilität bietet, Internationalisierung möglich ist und es sehr zukunftsorientiert ist. Sprachen lernen ist ein universelles, ständig an Bedeutung gewinnendes Thema. Es ist ein Bedürfnis der Menschen und es ist „sticky“ wie man im Internet-Jargon sagt, also dauerhaft.

Das Kernteam von Babbel kommt ja vom Berliner Musiksoftwarehersteller Native Instruments – spielte das eine Rolle?

Schüler:

Das Thema NI spielte eigentlich keine Rolle, gleichwohl aber die Erfahrung, die aufgrund dieser ersten unternehmerischen Verantwortung schon in dem Team drin gesteckt hat. Das hat man auch gemerkt, wie es sich präsentiert haben: Sehr authentisch und sehr professionell.

Hornberger:

Es wurde sehr, sehr präzise auf alle Fragen geantwortet, es wurde immer geliefert. Es gab ein sehr gutes Erwartungsmanagement, es wurden also nie Erwartungen geweckt, die man nicht erfüllen konnte. Am Ende des Tages muss man sich bei Geschäften vertrauen und dieses Vertrauen entsteht in den ersten Gesprächen. Da hat es vom professionellen Verständnis gut gepasst, aber auch von der Chemie her.

Mit wievielen Nutzern rechnen sie, die bereit sind einen „Premiumdienst“ von Babbel zu bezahlen?

Schüler:

Das ist uns im Grunde genommen gar nicht so wichtig. Wichtig ist, dass der Kern kommerzialisierbar ist. Denken sie an Sprachführer, Volkshochschulkurse oder Sprachreisen für die selbstverständlich bezahlt wird, das hat man verinnerlicht – das hat uns an der Stelle gereicht.

Aber sind denn viele User bereit, im Internet Geld auszugeben?

Hornberger:

Im Unterschied zu E-Mail oder Informationen ist  professionelles Sprachenlernen immer bezahlpflichtig. Seit der Schule ist man gewohnt, dafür Geld zu bezahlen; für ein Paket CDs von Langenscheidt zahlen sie hunderte Euro – wir glauben, dass dies es einfacher macht, Bezahldienste zu implementieren.

Schüler:

Letztendlich beruht es auf unserer eigenen Erfahrung. Wir haben auch ein Wachstum mit einem kostenlosen Produkt hingelegt, dem Freemail-Produkt von Web.de. Wir haben dann auch ein Club-Produkt eingeführt, wo sich jeder die Frage gestellt hat, warum soll da jemand für bezahlen – tatsächlich haben wir eine Menge gefunden, die das Bezahlprodukt gerne genommen haben und nach wie vor gerne nutzen. Entscheidend ist, dass das Grundthema das Potential hat international zu skalieren, um  auf große Zahlen zu kommen. Dann reicht ein kleiner Prozentsatz, der das Premiumprodukt wählt – und genau das erwarten wir bei Babbel.

Kann so ein Modell nur noch im Bildungsbereich funktionieren?

Hornberger:

Den Ansatz, den Babbel gewählt hat – entertainment-orientiert mit einem hohen Spaßfaktor, sehr multimedial, mit Bilder und Audioelementen – dieser Ansatz funktioniert auch in anderen Lern- und Bildungsbereichen; insofern besteht die Flexibilität das Modell auf andere Inhalte auszuweiten – dafür ist das Technik-Know-How von Babbel ein starkes Argument für unser Investment gewesen.

Nach welchen Investemtmöglichkeiten schauen sie sich mit Kizoo um?

Hornberger:

Es gibt im Internet immer noch interessante Segmente: Trotz Google ist das Thema Suche immer nochinteressant, das Thema Spiele ist ein spannendes Umfeld und Lernen, auch über Sprachen hinaus, ist ein weiteres Thema. Communities sind auf dem absteigenden Ast, der Markt ist überbesetzt und das werbefinanzierte Geschäftsmodell konnte sich bislang nicht behaupten. Wir hoffen aber auch Ideen zu sehen, an die bisher noch keiner gedacht hat, vor allem bei den mobilen Applikationen. Auch ein Google oder ein Amazon sind übrigens in der Frühphase von Investoren abgelehnt worden. Eine solche verpasste Gelegenheit wollen wir in 10 Jahren nicht erzählen müssen. deswegen muss man sich viel anschauen und genau hinsehen.

Was bedeutet die Finanzkrise für Internet-Investments?

Hornberger:

In der Start-up Phase bedeutet es relativ wenig, weil wenig Umsätze zu verteidigen sind und der Kreditfinanzierungsanteil nahe null liegt. Es hat natürlich einen Einfluss auf den Venture Capital-Markt. Dort sind Mittel nicht so vorhanden, wie man es vielleicht geplant hat. Insgesamt ist die Psychologie im Moment defensiv. Aber im Vergleich zum Häusermarkt oder der Autoindustrie ist der Bereich Internet-Investments als Risikobranche zu vernachlässigen: Das Web 2.0 braucht keinen staatlichen Schutzschirm. Es wird auch in 2009 gute Deals geben. Die Exits werden natürlich schwieriger.

Abschließende Frage Lernen sie gerade eine Sprache?

Schüler:

Ich lerne bei Babbel Spanisch.

Hornberger:

Ich lerne dort derzeit die Sprache, die dort am wenigstens gelernt wird, nämlich Italienisch. Ich liebe den dramatischen Klang der Sprache, bin aber leider noch nicht weit gekommen. Aber Babbel motiviert mich regelmäßig mit Emails.

(via WaterCoolerGames)

(via Spreeblick)

More then 200 Million high school students in China study English while about 25,000 of their U.S. counterparts study Chinese language according to a Report from a Northwestern University graduate journalism student. It is not only  global competition in economic terms which suffers under the unwillingness of more then the half of US high school students to learn a foreign language – but, according to some,  it’s also a national security risk. A language professor was cited as saying: “As the U.S. helps piece together the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, the former intelligence agent said he suspects there will be a greater need for Urdu, spoken in Pakistan; Hindi, spoken in India; and possibly Pashto, spoken in Afghanistan or Dari, spoken in eastern Iran and western Afghanistan.”

The Marines, at least, are taking language learning from a security point of view: Working together with the monolith of language learning software – Rosetta Stone – which won a $1.2 million contract for courses, the soldiers can learn about 30 languages in 150-200 hour courses through the MarineNet distant learning portal.

You hadn’t been to Berlin before you started the comic – How did you make a picture for yourself?

I did about two years of research before I started the project. My research consisted of just reading everything I could find about German history, Berlin, etc. All the texts I did consume were translated from German into English, so that limited the material that I had at my disposal. But I just got everything I could from books of art, to maps of the city, books of photographs, novels – anything I could get my hands on. It was until 4 years after I started the project that I actually visited Berlin for the first time – so from beginning researching the project to actually visiting was a period of about six years.

Did you recognize the city from your research?

I did, I was a little apprehensive, no, I was more than apprehensive, I was very anxious — almost terrified — to see the real place, because I was very worried that it would be so different from the story I was trying to tell that it would render what I’d done useless.

But I realized two things: One of them was that what I’d done, or what I had started to do, did feel at least connected to the real city that I saw – that was a relief. And the other thing that I realized was that there was no way I could actually really capture the density, the beauty and the richness of the actual place – and that also was a kind of relief. It is sort of futile to try and capture the spirit of a place – so I was able to just let go of that idea and realized that my version of Berlin is all that my story can be about. In the end, it is going to be my very personal, idiosyncratic notion of what the city is.

One of your main characters in the comic is Kurt Severing, a fictional character, who works for the magazine “Weltbühne”, which was an important critical voice in Germany at that time. Are there translations of their articles into English?

There are translations of select essays by certain writers of the ones that would become a little more well-known. I found a great book called “Germany’s Left-Wing Intellectuals during the Weimar Republic” which talks about the history of the magazine and about Carl von Ossietzky, and goes into some specific details about different writers. So there is some material out there but unfortunately I can’t read any in the original German.

Were there moments when you wished you could?

Definitely, yeah, that would have been great. And actually I tried. I went through a period of time where I made a concerted effort and try to learn. I don’t know if there’s a period when you’re an adult and it’s harder – nothing really stuck. It’s been frustrating and I really felt that it’s a great limitation to my ability to really engage with the subject matter as much as I would like to. It makes me regret only taking one year of German in high school, I tell you that.

Your novel takes place at the time when the  “Roaring Twenties” come to an end. Goebbels arrived in the German capital to lure the workers over to the Nazis, unemployement was rising – what made you choose this scenario?

It was an important idea for me, what it would have felt like to be there at the time, not with the benefit of hindsight. The thing that really drew me to that was the idea that it didn’t have to turn out the way that it did. It was a time when a lot of forces were pushing and pulling. And I don’t think that it was inevitable the way it did. I don’t know if it would been any better if the Communist Party had risen to power; it is obviously hard to figure that out. But I just became very interested in the circumstances that led up to Hitler becoming chancellor. Ultimately it came out of a desire to know more about the circumstances leading up to WWII and the Holocaust. Because I had had a public high school history education in America  and it was …eh… kind of lacking, to say the least.

The third book obviously will be about the rise of the fascists to power – so there will be no happy ending I guess?

We all know how it turns out in the bigger picture. I don’t want to have it be unrelentingly bleak. I want to try to be as honest to events as I can, but also to show that human experience in the darkest time is not all the stuff of depression. I do want to end it on a positive note, even knowing the events that have transpired. So I have a plan how to do that and we we’ll see how it will comes out at the end.

In the comic you sometimes show  bits of the daily life of people, which are not really important for the story as a whole – like a girl living on the street , or the Nazi Horst Wessels, who got famous after he got murdered. How did you get in the minds of these people, where did you get it from?

After absorbing all the information that I could , and after all the reading that I had done, I was trying to have an imaginary version of the city in my head, and ideas sort of occured to me. All of the characters are initially inspired by a photograph. In the case of Silva, the girl that you are talking about, I found a  book about German culture and there were some photographs of different aspects, different people in different circumstances. There was a picture of a German girl that appealed to me very much. So I took that picture and tried to make a copy of it. Then I put the photograph aside, and redrew the character from the drawing I made until she felt like more of a person, until I had a sense of who she might be. With all of my characters – there’s always a picture that I start with. And as I redraw that picture they sort of merge with my imaginary version of the city. And then the lives that they lead and the things that they do – I have to invent a lot and imagine circumstances or situations that might have happened to them.

You can do all the research that you want, but that act of imagining, making the leap from cold history to something that feels more alive – if people respond to the work at all, that’s what they respond to, the attempt to bring all that stuff to life.

What would you say is the point in time when things could have gone in a different direction back then?

There is no way that I can point to one thing. When I look at any volatile period in history, it is like a web, it’s like chaos theory – everything is interconnected and the smallest change somewhere could affect things elsewhere. It would be hard to pick one thing, but if Horst Wessel hadn’t been shot things would have unfolded differently, not that differently, but just as an example. He could have survived that, it didn’t had to turn out the way that it did. He probably would have still been considered some kind of martyr for just being shot. But the fact that he died really added energy and power to what the National Socialists did afterwards. And earlier than that: Karl Liebknecht und Rosa Luxemburg, they were forces of serious change; they had a lot of ability to get things done. If things had turned out differently for them, it would have been a different picture.

Which books would you recommend on Berlin?

For me one of the great influences and just a great experience was “Berlin Alexanderplatz” by Döblin. That was just a wonderful textured depiciton of not only Berlin at the time, but it has the feeling of what it must have felt like for the world to be changing so quickly with increased urban density and advances in technology. That book really captures the feeling of a modernizing, chaotic, changing world. And portraying people in the midst of that in a very affecting way. If people are really interested in thats period that is the one book that I would recommend to read.