Stumbling upon our racial history
The United States and Germany have their tortured and destructive pasts.
For the U.S., it is the sin of slavery and its legacy of lynching and other acts of racial violence. For Germany, it is the crime of Nazism and the Holocaust.
How those pasts are remembered is telling.
The U.S. has a difficult time acknowledging its past. For example, there are many who still find it appropriate to have Confederate statues and flags in public.
By contrast, Germany has been more honest in acknowledging its awful past. I think it began with West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s 1970 genuflection at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw.
Today, there is no better example of Germany’s acknowledgment of guilt than the 96,000 Stolpersteine laid in front of the last place Holocaust victims freely lived.
“Stolpersteine” translates in English to “stumbling stones.” One does not stumble on them, however. A person stumbles upon them in the course of simply walking on sidewalks throughout Europe. The stones interrupt the present and take the observer back to the horror of the Holocaust.
Stolpersteine are small brass plaques, roughly 4-by-4 inches, that begin “HERE LIVED,” followed by the person’s name, date of birth and what happened to them. For some, it is
suicide or liberation. For most, it is deportation to a concentration or extermination camp and murder.
The Stolpersteine project was created by German artist Gunter Demnig. He made and installed the first stones in the early-1990s and continues, at 75, to install most stones. In 2005, Demnig asked Michael Friedrichs-friedlander of Berlin to make the stones.
Each stone is hand engraved, one letter at a time. It is one name per stone, inspired by the teaching in the Talmud that “a
person is only forgotten when his or her name is forgotten.”
Friedrichs-friedlander refuses to mechanize the process.
Stones have been done in almost 30 countries in more than 20 different languages. The majority of the Stolpersteine are for Jewish victims. Stones are also done for Roma and Sinti people, homosexuals, the disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political opponents of Nazism, and others.
Demnig’s creation is the largest decentralized monument in the world. Local
groups help initiate the installation of the stones, local school children frequently do research on individuals who are memorialized, and neighbors often participate in the ceremony of laying the stones.
I remember the first group of Stolpersteine I stumbled across in Berlin. They were grouped by families in front of an apartment house. Since they were small, I had to bend over to read them. Bending over resembled bowing.
One can come upon a single Stolperstein for one person or a group of Stolpersteine for a family. Then there are the 34 Stolpersteine in front of a Jewish orphanage in Hamburg, where the children, ages 1 to 6, were murdered.
Friedrichs-friedlander has said, “the whole point of the Stolpersteine is their humanity — the emotional connection they require with the life and fate of each victim.”
Stolpersteine do get dirty. After all, they are set flush to the sidewalk. Dates of community cleanings are frequently set for Jan. 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and June 12, Anne Frank’s birthday.
Imagine if the U.S. had a Stolpersteine project.
What if plaques were set at the sites of every lynching? The U.S. had nearly 6,500 racial terror lynchings from 1865-1950 according to Equal Justice Initiative. There could be plaques to mark the sites of those atrocities.
“Lynching in Texas,” a project of Sam Houston State University, has tracked lynchings from 1882-1945 in Texas and tallies more than 600 lynchings in that period. The project notes five lynchings in the San Antonio area. Those murders could be marked by individual plaques.
The U.S. has an amazing memorial to lynching victims in Montgomery, Ala., but people can ignore a single museum. We should follow the Stolpersteine model and place a marker at the site of each lynching.
It would be harder to ignore our history if we would do that.