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Time Warp

Since the disappearance of pinball machines, cities have changed. They've become glassier, more transparent. Their centers and main streets are now lined with bright store fronts, nail salons, coffee shops, hookah lounges, Asian bistros, start-up offices - places that were all but unknown during the heyday of pinball. Perhaps my memory deceives me, but I can't recall a single transparent place on the streets of my childhood, with their rows of apartment buildings, stores, and pubs. My neighborhood's many bars, bakeries, and restaurants serving Yugoslavian or "home-style" cuisine (this type of food was never called "German," oddly enough) all had wooden doors with yellowish curtains, and large posters advertising special offers covered the windows of the supermarkets, convenience stores, and stationery stores. The only places that seemed to offer a full view of the interior were the butcher shops.

With today's cafés and pubs, it would be possible to identify immediately from the outside whether or not there was a pinball machine inside. Sometimes, while I'm walking by, I'll see a spot behind a large window that would be perfect for a machine - typical locations for pinball machines in the past were by the toilet doors or in a corner at the end of the bar. Once, when looking into a Turkish restaurant, the open space between the counter, the wall, and the window seemed to have been created so precisely - a gap in the very shape of a pinball machine - that for a moment a flashing game stood before my eyes like a mirage.

When there were still pinball machines, very few of them revealed themselves at first glance. They had to be discovered inside bars and restaurants, often in out-of-the-way places: in a narrow hallway at the back, where the restrooms and the cigarette machine were located; in a side room with a pool table, which a few steps led up to; or even in the basement or in the entryway of a bowling alley. The advantage of this situation was that I was able to spend half an afternoon playing pinball at an age when I wouldn't have been allowed to go to one of these narrow pubs on my own. I would ask at the bar whether I could use the toilet, rush full of excitement to the back of the place, and play the machines without being noticed. (The more often I got to play a given game, the more familiar it would become to me, and thus the longer my budget of 2 or 3 Deutschmarks would last.) The bartender had long forgotten about me; occasionally, one of the drinkers would come back for a pack of cigarettes and give me a conspiratorial look as he left.

Among these dim, almost hidden pinball spots, there was one exception, a venue where the machines were openly on display - the brightly lit arcades, which were mostly located near the train station. Adorned with neon lettering, their large window could be seen from afar, and it's been quite a sharp reversal in the appearance of cities that today's remaining arcades are now the hidden blind spots among so many bright rows of shops. Arcades today are hermetic places with blackened windows whose façades, according to a German law passed in 2012, "must be designed in such a way that it is impossible to see inside the premises from the outside." In the days of pinball machines, arcades were promising, permeable places whose sounds - the amplified rattling and whirring of dozens of machines - could be heard from afar by people on the street, as though they were approaching a nearby fairground. Today, those who overcome their fear of blacked-out windows and open the door to an arcade will enter instead a sealed and almost sterile space. The arcade games stand on clean carpeting (there are no longer any pinball machines or other devices "for amusement only"), and a few players sit in front of them on barstools with backrests and stoically push their buttons. Much like the smoking areas in airports and train stations, these are ghettos - intentionally displaced from the world at large - for a left-over group of addicts.

My orientation in my home town, and especially in its southern districts, is still defined by the former locations of pinball machines; the pubs and their machines - around the Slaughterhouse District and the Wholesale Market, along the river toward the zoo - form in my mind a reliable map of the city. According to the moving blue dot on my iPhone, I may head south along Thalkirchnerstraße from the roundabout at the Wholesale Market and go left onto Brudermühlstraße before turning, just before the main highway, onto the narrow Bruderhofstraße, which eventually leads to Schäftlarnstraße along the Isar river. Even after 40 years, however, my internal topography sees this same route as a trip from one pinball machine to another. From the game Pharaoh in a pub by the roundabout whose name I've forgotten, the path leads to Medusa, which we played in a seedy drinking hole called Dudlhofer, to Time Warp with its banana flippers in the Herzog Siegfried pub (or was it called Herzog Anton?), and on from there to Gorgar in the Wasserturm, and finally to the Panthera game, which was in the very back of a Western-themed bar called Oklahoma. Not one of these places still exists today. At some point, the Herzog Siegfried pub was replaced by a Greek restaurant and then by a tapas bar (the inevitable fate of nearly all Greek restaurants toward the end of the 1990s). The place by the roundabout, the Wasserturm, and Oklahoma are no longer restaurants or pubs at all. They were eventually converted into ground-floor apartments or office spaces, and only the newer brickwork around their entrances (wider doors were replaced with narrower doors) provides a clue that they were once drinking establishments.

During the early 1980s, in a West German city such as Munich, flashing pinball machines and their glamorous themes represented to me, perhaps more than anything else, the promises of American culture. The three main producers of these games - Bally, Williams, and Gottlieb - were all based in Chicago, and after the Second World War their machines found their way into the remotest provinces of Germany, France, and Italy. Pier Paolo Pasolini once expressly described the increasing "Americanism" of Europe in the second half of the twentieth century as an "era of pinball and television." And, in fact, as an 11- or 12-year-old playing the games Kiss, Charlie's Angels, or Six Million Dollar Man in the back of a pub, I felt more closely connected with American pop culture than I would have if I'd only listened to the records or watched the TV shows of the same name. Throughout the duration of a game, operating a pinball machine and lighting up its targets allowed me to participate somewhat in the distant homeland of glitter and glam. Looking back now, I tend to think that these machines were perhaps even more meaningful for us Europeans than they were for players in the United States because their themes and motifs were not self-explanatory to us. In the gray concrete dreariness of West Germany, I probably took American culture more seriously than the Americans themselves.

The bygone world of pinball is now only preserved in old movies and television shows. Especially during the period of their greatest popularity (the five or six golden years ending in 1982, which luckily coincided with my own discovery of pinball machines), they regularly appear in bar scenes, whether as part of the action or, more often, as mere background scenery. Pinball machines will show up on screen briefly without any function and perhaps unintentionally - as an incidental sign of the times like an advertisement, or a plastic bag with the logo of a certain department store. In films and television series from the early 1980s, such beautiful moments can occur at any given time: at the Parisian shopping center in the film La Boum, where Vic and her friends from school hang out and where a Supersonic game can be seen in the background; in Helmut Dietl's television series Monaco Franze, in which the hero waits late at night in a gambling parlor for his young girlfriend to finish work and walks past a Flash Gordon machine; or in the show Manni, der Libero, where a bunch of young soccer players are shown playing the game Strikes and Spares in the clubhouse after practice.

Nostalgic for the devices I'd learned to play on - the first electronic pinball machines made by Bally and Williams, with red computer digits instead of the obligatory mechanical display - I've been systematically searching through movie and television clips for a long time. In doing so, I chose to ignore the growing number of YouTube videos in which fully restored machines are shown off in the basements or garages of hobbyists. I had no interest in these machines as collector items with keys in their coin boxes and perpetual free play. I only took into account movie or television scenes that showed pinball machines in their original surroundings, as public games on which anyone with a coin could test their skill.

The most productive source for such scenes seemed to be crime series, for the simple reason that detectives and inspectors always seem to end up at places where pinball machines might be. I searched through numerous episodes of German crime shows such as Derrick or Tatort (Crime Scene)...