The Passage is an interactive narrative experience in virtual reality, inviting the user to follow the different life paths of a family in Nazi Germany and how those choices emotionally imprinted on the daughter — and the generations that followed her.
The experience explores questions of transgenerational trauma: how our choices can affect the entire chain of generations to come, how wounds are inherited, and how they might be healed.
We follow the fragmented memories of this family: the mother, who moves to Berlin to become a high-ranking manager at a luxury hotel serving the Nazi elite; the father, disillusioned by the political climate, who becomes a jazz musician on a cruise ship to escape Germany and travel the world; and the daughter, who remains in rural Bavaria, adopted by a foster family that becomes part of the resistance.
Though rooted in one family’s story, The Passage speaks to a universal truth: the legacies of war, oppression, and displacement continue to shape lives long after the events themselves have passed. By drawing parallels to crises past and present, the experience shows that transgenerational trauma is not confined to history books, but lives on in families across cultures and eras — whether as the echoes of suffering endured many generations ago, or as wounds being created in the world today.
Direction: Nicole C. Strasser
Script: Susanne Aßmann
Game Design: Priscilla Larcher
Supported by FFF Bayern
