Kriegsspielbank: Gambling is a Weltanschauung
The Wiesbaden casino looks like a train station. A beautiful, functional building shared everyday by thousands of people, some for longer, some for shorter periods, without needing to interact unless they wish to. Because a train station places you in the middle of the world, many socially adrift people hang around stations. But that’s where the resemblance ends: a station doesn’t care whether you have money to lose or not; a station calls you to travel. On the other hand, the casino presents itself as a deadend, reserved for the happy few.
At the end of a walkway flanked by arcades housing cafés, spas, and slot machine halls, a short flight of steps beneath Doric columns leads us into a grand 19th-century building : the Wiesbaden casino. Here, we smile at each other over the absurdity of such a place even existing—but we go in anyway. It’s precisely for this nihilistic posture that we come. Thousands of euros are swallowed every two or five minutes, depending on the rhythm of each table. If, once in a while, someone wins, most lose what they either can or cannot afford to lose. Because we are the guests of the film festival, the casino gives us €2 each—a tiny token that feels ridiculous even before comparing it to its larger siblings. Besides, it’s 10 sp.m., and the minimum bet has gone up to €5.
Earlier in the day, a recorded audio tour on a little tourist train had explained that the presence of Russian aristocracy in the city coincided with its golden age. Upon arrival in Wiesbaden, the mayor opened the film festival I had been invited to and likewise explained that the city awaited better days with the return of Russian elites. Only a few people refused to applaud his speech. It was in casinos of these German spa towns, including Wiesbaden, that Dostoyevsky, the famous Russian writer and nationalist, lost his savings and was forced by his publishers into the pact that forged his myth: to finish a new book at record speed or lose the rights to his entire catalog.
Despite having experimented with a broad range of life’s vices, it was my first time entering a casino. It was a Dutch film critic, a kind of eccentric intellectual from a bygone romantic social world—Tadeusz Fipresci, whom I had met a few days earlier—who convinced me to join. Physically, Tadeusz is an average-height, slim man, with a goatee and glasses, his face like a satyr’s, always with a thin woman’s cigarette dangling from his lips. Some say he looks like Fellini’s Satyricon. Tadeusz explains everything a novice needs to know about a casino: the rules of the games, statistics, analyses of losses and gains, etiquette. After this peripatetic introduction around the tables, we pause for a cigarette—it’s allowed inside the casino, surely so you don’t step outside and realize the sun or moon cost nothing and life feels better out there. Tadeusz asks a guy staring blankly into space what he does for a living. Nothing. I play. But how do you pay your rent? By playing. Without further questions, the guy returns to his trance, perhaps trying to devise a numeric strategy to either honor or trick the god of luck—a strategy that can only speed up or slow down his losses. You see, Tadeusz tells me, that’s the wonderful thing here—everyone vibrates in an indescribable way. We stub out our cigarettes; he takes me over to learn blackjack. You’ll understand something in a moment, he says with a gleam in his eye, the rule is: you win slowly at roulette, and lose everything in an instant at blackjack. A seat opens up, and Tadeusz jumps into it. His African American neighbor is losing seriously, as if possessed by a demon pushing him to raise his bet as his chips get devoured by the dealer, who drops them into a black hole. An Asian woman plays, imperturbable, eyeing me sideways, perhaps thinking a beginner might shift the table’s luck. Tadeusz peppers the crowd with loud questions, almost shouting, like a trickster distracting attention: he’s trying to understand the magic of the “Crazy Twin”—a rule added to accelerate losses and thus intensify the thrill. A guy standing nearby, only glancing at the table when an action is required from him, bets on my hand. We double our chips.
If the whole city yearns for the return of Russian elites, there isn’t a single Russian in the room tonight. The oligarchs and lesser bourgeoisie—so typical of spa towns, ski resorts, and seaside retreats since the 19th century and again since the 1990s—now keep a low profile, venturing to Europe only in places where it’s still charming to be Russian, where sanctions are easily sidestepped, and where it’s almost garanty not to be arrested : Monaco, Switzerland, Montenegro, Cyprus, Serbia. A few thousand kilometers away, Russia’s large scale invasion against Ukraine, now over three years old, has drawn a line before and after for these Russian elites so cherished by those who, like them, see gambling and destructive potlatch as an existential life plan, a shared weltanschauung. For what this war has brutally revealed to the world—though still misunderstood by many—is that Russia doesn’t play chess. It plays its life and others’ at a casino table. It is, by turns, the casino and the client of the casino, trying to impose this worldview on those who increasingly believe social progress undermines authority—especially their own.
One of the most popular slogans among Russian nationalists is “They die, while we go to heaven.” The goal here isn’t victory, but the manner of dying—or, more precisely, the mythological posture of the one who dies. Even dismembered by a drone while trying to flee, the Russian soldier dies like a Russian, eligible for eternal recognition of a groundless, inexplicable idea that halts at the sheer force of its pronouncement. This added layer convinces those not fighting that the Russian idea is strong enough for one to leap into the void for it alone, to denounce a neighbor for it, to kill one’s father for it—mass death is salvation, and, utlimately, paradise will also be invaded by Russians. And if Russians are supposedly treated worse there than others, a new divine casus belli can emerge, and Russia will attempt, as though Don Quixote commanded a vast army and a real arsenal, to invade the heavens.
For years, the Cold War pushed its main rivals to perform elaborate calculations, as if everything were being played out on a chessboard. Indeed, when weapons weren’t roaring in proxy territories, direct confrontation often happened over chessboards—through memorable, highly publicized matches. Chess is a myth, known as a space where luck and cheating are excluded. Two brains face off: two educational systems, two genetic selections. You can dope every organ in the body except the brain. And it’s not merely an exceptional human who wins; it’s a biological machine produced by a specific economy: capitalism versus socialism.
But nobody is interested in playing chess anymore. In fact, non-biological machines have become the best players, and the most powerful among them isn’t in Russia. Putinism thus returned Russia to one of its cultural classics: the death game, the “Russian roulette”, where reality matters as much—or less—than imagination, bluff. Authority no longer derives from complexity but from the ineffable. That’s what fascinates autocrats, big and small, around the world.
Compared to other games, a casino player statistically has a decent chance of winning (just under 50% if betting on red or black at roulette, for example). But the more you play, the more likely you are to lose, since the casino has at least one extra chance: the zero. But the casino also has something else: the luxurious decor, the proximity to a rich and powerful society. It owns the pretense, the lie. The casino is allowed to cheat; the player is not. The casino is draped in finery; it is the institution; its dominance is acknowledged upfront. It holds the authority of luck, and we submit without protest. Unlike the state, one doesn’t need complex theory to see through its grip. The casino is a solid ideology. Everyone is equally subject to it—you could get rich here, even starting with nothing. You could also, and far more likely, lose everything, whether rich or poor. In the casino, one gambles on the existence of God, endlessly.
As I explain this viewpoint to Tadeusz Fipresci, he recalls an Italian film by Luigi Comencini, released in 1972. The Scientific Cardplayer. Tadeusz grows thoughtful: “In fact, after what you just said, I think this film deserves a new interpretation.” The Scientific Cardplayer portrays an old American billionaire, travelling the world at the peak of her wealth. In each country, she challenges poor people to high-stakes card games to prove her success is due to her cleverness, that everyone deserves his position. Her favorite game is scopone scientifico, an Italian card game of memory and strategy. But the game is rigged, precisely because she’s very rich. Since it’s a money game and she doubles the stakes each time, she’s sure to keep going indefinitely—and thus to win overwhelmingly by wearing down her opponents under the illusion of her infinite wealthness . I see, I say. So the old lady simolizes Russia? Yes. And the players are the Russians themselves, but also their adversaries? Exactly. Everyone who plays Russia’s game—like everyone who plays the casino’s game—is bound to lose in the long run.
When we finally decide to leave the casino, I pocket a small part of the chips I’d bought at the entrance, as if to tell myself I’m not totally fooled. Tadeusz, who thought he’d only lost half his bankroll, can’t find the chips he believed he had left. That’s the casino, he says nonchalantly. The machine makes you lose your sense of reality. It’s an extraordinary, but terrible, vibration.
Outside, the city is deserted. Wiesbaden is full of very old people, a waiting room for death, the liveliest cemetery in Germany. People come here to die from all over the country. This extra-regional geriatric immigration, while increasing the number of deaths per capita, allows the city to survive without industry, tourism, or Russian elites.
