Stumbling my way through Berlin
Artist Gunter Demnig has made it his mission to remind people of the horrors of the Holocaust, one victim at a time, writes University of Pittsburgh professor MICHAEL MEYER
On an otherwise gray Berlin sidewalk, the cobblestones shone like a pair of gold fillings, halting me in my tracks. The 4-inch brass squares were set flush in the walkway fronting shoe shops and a Starbucks. One square bore a carved inscription that read, in German: “Here lived Paula Davidsohn, born 1905 in Berlin, deported in 1943, died in Auschwitz.” Nestled against her plaque was a cobblestone inscribed with the name of her son, Ury, also killed in Auschwitz in 1943, the year he was born.
Berlin has 8,000 of these small memorials, called stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones.” The name evokes an obstacle, leading to an accidental discovery. They upended my weekend: I tossed out planned museum visits and instead hunted stolpersteine across Berlin, spying their brassy glint down quaint residential streets and amid crowded shopping plazas.
World War II, rendered in my mind as a distant event in blackand-white, was suddenly near. The Holocaust, the murder of 6 million people, is incomprehensible, but the stolpersteine evoke individual victims. “If you read the name of one person,” their creator said, “calculate his age, look at his old home and wonder behind which window he used to live, then the horror has a face to it.”
Stolpersteine began not with a government commission but as an individual act of civil disobedience. Twenty-five years ago, on Dec. 16, 1992, the 50th anniversary of the “Auschwitz Decree,” artist Gunter Demnig carved Himmler’s deportation order into a brass cobblestone and illegally mortared it into the pavement in front of Cologne City Hall.
Born in Berlin shortly after the war, Mr. Demnig then returned to his hometown to install stones bearing the names of Holocaust victims — most of them Jews, but also Roma, Sinti, gays and dissidents. He set the stones into the sidewalk in front of each victim’s last known residence.
“The Talmud holds that a person is only forgotten when his or her name is forgotten,” Mr. Demnig wrote on his website, where he takes requests from victims’ kin to create a stolpersteine, then enlists local schoolchildren to research biographical details. Each cobblestone costs $141.
“In a way, my stolpersteine are small,” Mr. Demnig recently said. And yet, he continued, in their own way the stones are bigger than any monument, including the $29 million Holocaust Memorial near the Brandenburg Gate, a field of undulating slabs built where the villa of Hitler’s propagandist, Joseph-Goebbels, once stood.
“That is a memorial in the center of the city. I’m all over Germany. North, south, east and west.” (Only Munich bans the cobblestones; city leaders ruled they are too reminiscent of the Nazi-era practice of looting Jewish cemeteries and paving sidewalks with their tombstones.) “The stones are in front of houses where the people lived, where people live. Every time you step you have to look.”
All museums tell stories, often political ones. I spent much of my adult life in China, where “patriotic education bases” whitewash the past to depict historical events as leading inevitably to to communist “liberation.” The stones of Tiananmen Square, for instance, were recently laid — to erase the damage from the tanks that soldiers drove through the square to bloodily quash the 1989 democracy protests. Young Chinese today know little of the Tiananmen movement beyond the official verdict that the government was forced to put down a “counter-revolutionary riot.”
Russia, too, is afflicted with selective amnesia. The Kremlin has branded the grassroots group Memorial a “foreign agent” and raided its offices. Its members nonetheless recently gathered in Moscow’s Lubyanka Square to continue reading aloud the names of the 40,000 Russians executed during Stalin’s purges. Efforts to place plaques similar to stolpersteine at the Moscow homes of these victims have created dissention. The director of the city’s new Gulag Museum said it, too, faced opposition when it opened. “No one has ever forced us to face up to what happened.”
This fall’s German elections put before voters a xenophobic party whose leader said in a campaign speech that Germany should be done atoning for its past, that Germans “have the right to be proud of the achievements of the German soldiers in two world wars.” In September, the party — the Alternative for Germany, or AfD — won the third-largest share of votes and 94 seats in the Bundestag. For the first time in six decades, a far-right party has power in Berlin.
Museums and memorials to terrible events often instruct visitors to never forget. But what does it take to actively remember? When present-day political events sink my spirits, I think of Gunter Demnig and his quiet, defiant determination to bear witness to atrocities that took place before he was born.
Last year, dressed in a denim work shirt and Indiana Jones fedora, the 70year-old Mr. Demnig spent 258 days in his minivan, driving around Europe to mortar stolpersteine. Over the past 25 years, he has installed 66,000 of them.
“Each stone in a way is like my baby,” he said. “Each imprint is one person. I will be doing this until the end of my life.”