Volume 3 Article 3

2-15-2017 STOLPERSTEINE, GERMANS REMEMBER HOLOCAUST VICTIMS Claus Pierach Dr. University of Minnesota Medical School, Dept of Medicine, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Pierach, Claus Dr. (2017) "STOLPERSTEINE, GERMANS REMEMBER HOLOCAUST VICTIMS," Journal of Opinions, Ideas, & Essays: Vol. 3 , Article 3. Available at: http://pubs.lib.umn.edu/joie/vol3/iss1/3

The Journal of Opinions, Ideas, & Essays is published by the University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing. Authors retain ownership of their articles. STOLPERSTEINE, GERMANS REMEMBER HOLOCAUST VICTIMS

Abstract A German artist, Gunter Demnig, has since 1996 inserted more than 60,000 stolpersteine (tripping stones) on public pavements, squares and sidewalks, commemorating the location where persons had lived prior to their deportation to concentration camps, and thus, to their death. These stolpersteine are brass squares (10x10 cm), mounted flush on oc bble stones and stating "Here lived", followed by the victim's name, year of birth, date of deportation, place and year of death. The deported were mostly Jews, but also Roma, Sintis, homosexuals, disabled, dissidents and other persecuted persons during the Nazi era (1933-1945). By now, stolpersteine have been placed in more than 1600 towns in twenty European countries. The expenses of $130 per stolperstein are borne by donations from family, friends and anonymous donors. This decentralized project is not without controversy and has not been permitted in a few cities, for example in Munich with the city's governing board arguing that it is inappropriate to walk across these plaques; possible political reasons are not transparent. Where forbidden, stolpersteine are occasionally placed on private grounds as close as possible to public sidewalks. While memorials to fallen soldiers and victims of persecution are often anonymous, stolpersteine give those who were murdered for political reasons a place to remember them, following a motto of this movement "The es cret of remembrance is the proximity".

Keywords Holocaust, Third Reich, Concentration camps

Cover Page Footnote NA

This essay is available in Journal of Opinions, Ideas, & Essays: http://pubs.lib.umn.edu/joie/vol3/iss1/3 Pierach: Stolpersteine

STOLPERSTEINE, GERMANS REMEMBER HOLOCAUST VICTIMS

Claus A. Pierach, MD

War memorials mostly focused on soldiers. Often wall plaques in churches and town squares list the names and occasionally bluntly surmise that it is sweet and honorable to have died for the Fatherland. The German government erected The National Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny with an enlarged sculpture by the German artist Käthe Kollwitz who had lost a son in World War I. Her Pietà (“compassion”) stands inside an old open guard house, the Neue Wache in Berlin, Unter den Linden. In this monumental sculpture a woman cradles her dead son. Promptly the question arose: and

what about women who also were victims? If indeed it depicts a Christian theme, it could be considered an insult to Jews. And it is all so anonymous, no dates, no names, no numbers. But one might also defend the Pietà (compassion) as a universal theme of mankind, the intense grief of a parent over a lost child or member of the family. Compassion is not reserved for Christianity and transcends religious aspects as a human trait.

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Now look at the well-done Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, superbly conceived by Maya Lin. Here, 58,000 names are etched on a simple wall, so polished that whoever gets close to see a certain name also sees one's own face reflected, thus establishing a connection between the living and the dead. No ornament, no decoration, just here and there a few wilting flowers or a personal memento. Only the names are given, no rank, no date. Stark, deeply moving and timeless.

In the early 1990s the German artist Gunter Demnig conceived the idea of creating individual commemorative plaques for the victims of persecution. Demnig was born in 1947 in Berlin, studied art and design at

academies in Berlin and in Kassel/Germany. From 1977 until 1978 he was involved with the restoration of monuments. Since 1980 he is associated with the Art Department at the University in Kassel. He now lives in Cologne. His first project that brought him some notoriety was an American flag on a garage; he had replaced the stars with skulls. He was arrested and kept in jail for 3 hours. Demnig, bothered by the terrible anonymity of the mass executions under the Nazis, wanted to give the victims their names back. They had no tomb stones. The danger was undeniable that sooner or later they would be forgotten, just as it says in the Talmud, "A person is only forgotten when his or her name is forgotten." Demnig chose brass, a rather durable medium to create what he called stolpersteine, freely translated as ‘stumbling’ or ‘tripping stones.’ Once mounted on a cobble stone and inserted flush into

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the pavement one finds them mostly by happenstance, although by now, there are city maps available showing where to find them. The small size of the stolpersteine, 10 x 10 cm, makes them rather inconspicuous.

To make these memorial stones as personal as possible, Demnig put the stolpersteine with a victim's pertinent information on the walkway right in front of the house where the person last lived or worked before deportation to concentration camps, now signaling a form of homecoming. In at least one instance relatives placed a photo of the victim into that

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little grave beneath the stolperstein that was to be inserted moments later. In that sense Demnig might be considered a gravedigger, at the same time one of the noblest and one of the humblest professions in any society. Even the homeless are not forgotten. On the well-known Alexanderplatz in Berlin, stolpersteine are inserted in memory of deported and murdered homeless. Demnig extended his project by also inserting stolperschwellen, “stumbling thresholds,” where on brass rails multiple names are engraved of people who were deported, for example, from the railroad station in Stralsund, Germany. While Demnig still inserts each stolperstein himself, he no longer personally engraves all the brass plaques. For this he gets help from the sculptor Michael Friedrichs-Friedländer who executes this labor of love by hand in his studio outside of Berlin. He reported how deeply moved he was engraving 30 thirty names of orphans and their four caretakers onto brass plaques for stolpersteine to be inserted in front of a Hamburg orphanage. "They were between 3 and 5 years old", he reports, "I could not sleep for weeks." Demnig is helped in his project by volunteers and by school children who take it as a project to find out details about the victim. This often was circuitous and incomplete. Yes, a person was deported to a concentration camp, but the day of the murder may have remained unknown. All stolpersteine are similar and basically state "Here lived", followed by the victim's name, the year of birth, the day of deportation, the year and the place of the murder. All this is hammered by hand into a brass plaque and mounted onto a cement cobblestone, later to be inserted into the

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sidewalk. This is done by Demnig himself who always brings along his tools: e.g. a shovel, a mallet and, if necessary, a special saw to open the pavement. On busy days he embeds a hundred or more of these stolpersteine, adhering to a time schedule and avoiding any pomp.

Neighbors are always notified and invited, some music may be performed, and flowers may be strewn over the stolpersteine. Well, since they are embedded at level in the pavement they are not really tripping or stumbling stones. Only the eye gets caught, and if one wants to read the inscription, one must bow one's head, sometimes genuflect. On purpose? By now Demnig has inserted 60,000 stolpersteine in more than 1600 towns in twenty European countries, truly a decentralized monument. In Berlin alone, where he had inserted the first stolpersteine merely as an art project, there are by now 10,000 of these memorial plaques or tombstones. These not only reflect Jewish fate, but, according to Demnig, anybody who became a victim of Nazi persecution can and even should be remembered with a stolperstein, a huge undertaking, considering that the International Tracing Service contains 159,972 names and data of Holocaust victims for the time from 1933 to 1945. That of course, is only a fraction of the number of people who disappeared and were murdered.

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Lübeck is an old town in Northern Germany, famous for its Brick Gothic buildings which led to its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Approximately 200,000 people live there. It has a busy port on the Baltic Sea, and a university. Today 193 stolpersteine can be found in its streets. Lübeck was considered the Queen of the Hanseatic League, an old and once powerful trade organization. Among its many merchants was a considerable number of Jews, but exact numbers are unavailable and may never be known. There was no central registry for Jews, but some evidence from the Lübeck synagogue and Jewish schools gives the following numbers. In 1933 there lived at least 497 Jews, in 1938 there were still 293. In December 1941 ninety Jews were deported to Riga and only six of those survived. The fate that befell many during the Third Reich (1933-1945) was in most part due to denunciation by neighbors. When in the 1930s the persecution of the Jews increased, there existed little problem of finding them. Still, some managed to escape, others were hidden, and some committed suicide. After the Holocaust ended it became difficult to trace their fate. The German government and the churches felt uncomfortable to commemorate the fate of the many victims of Nazi persecution. While it seemed already a challenge to erect a memorial to the fallen soldiers, the victims of persecution seemed all but forgotten. Lübeck is my German home town. I try to go there maybe every year, and when there in the fall of 2015 I, by chance, found a stolperstein in one of the many old streets. Yes, I had seen them before, but I admit my curiosity was not aroused, and I had not inquired about them. But now, on a beautiful fall day, they seemed to glisten as if to catch my attention. My address in Lübeck is Wakenitzstrasse 61. I discovered a stolperstein in the Wakenitzstrasse in front of an apartment building with the number 8. Philipp Dilloff had lived here. He is an example of what stolpersteine now commemorate.

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Details of Dilloff's life and death were diligently listed on www.stolpersteine-luebeck.de. A brief excerpt follows: He was born on December 18, 1863 in Frankenberg an der Eder, the youngest son of Loeb and Fanny Dilloff. A stolperstein is also placed in front of their home, Pferdemarkt 3. The Jewish family was highly esteemed in the small Hessian town where he grew up. His siblings were Benedict, Friederike, Moses and Sannchen. Dilloff became a teacher in the Israelite community where approximately 100 Jews lived, teaching about fifteen children until his retirement in 1923. In 1925 Dilloff and his wife, Veilchen, moved to Riga to be nearer to their married daughter, Elsa Häusler, whose husband was a lawyer from Lübeck. In 1927 the entire family moved to Lübeck. Veilchen died in 1932. In April 1934 the Dilloffs moved to the house at 8 Wakenitzstrasse. From January 1939 on every Jew was forced to add as their middle name Sara or Israel and to wear the Jewish star. The family tried to emigrate, but paperwork and finances were an insurmountable burden. However, the grandchildren, Immanuel and Mirjam, left Lübeck with a children transport and lived in a children's home in Stockholm, supported by the Jewish community. Their parents succeeded in leaving Germany and henceforth lived in Uppsala, Sweden. Philipp, now 76 years old, was forced to leave his apartment at 8 Wakenitzstrasse and was hidden by two Jewish sisters who were deported in 1941. Philipp found temporary shelter in the previous Jewish nursing home from which he was deported on July 19, 1942 with Transport VI/2 to the ghetto in Theresienstadt (a Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia). On September 23, 1942 Philipp Dilloff was transported to Treblinka. It is assumed that he died in a gas

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chamber shortly after arrival. He was 79 years old. None of the Dilloff- Häusler family ever moved back to Lübeck. Hans-Olaf Pfannkuch, professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Minnesota, told me of his own experience growing up in Berlin at Traunsteiner-Strasse 8. It was early in 1943 when, in his apartment building, fifteen persons were deported, of whom four are now remembered in stolpersteine in front of the house. Hans-Olaf told me of a scene he vividly remembers when a young man, suffering from Parkinson's disease, helpless and dependent on his mother, was abducted and deported by Nazis. His mother yelled after them something like, "Take me along with him!" to which the executors of this tyrannical order answered "Just wait, your turn will come."

Anyone can sponsor a stolperstein or designate a certain person. The cost is €120 (~$130). Demnig himself will insert the stolperstein and he does so approximately 400 times in a month. He abhors the idea that this might be considered a hectic routine but concentrates on every stolperstein to be inserted. At this point he is booked until June 2017. Details about him and his schedule are available on his website www.stolpersteine.eu/ Stolpersteine are not without controversy. While welcome and revered in many cities, a notable rejection still exists in Munich where it is not allowed to place stolpersteine in the public pavement. Those that had been placed have been removed. This controversy goes back to 2004 with an ongoing to-and-fro. Some political parties favor the placement of stolpersteine on public ground, others object, among them Charlotte Knobloch, chair of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde in Munich. The objection focusses on the circumstance that stolpersteine might be thoughtlessly trampled on by passers-by. They argue that a better, more dignified way must be found to honor the victims of Nazi persecution. Yet one cannot escape the thought that the objection may have something to do with pride or shame that Munich was once called the Capital of the Movement, i.e. the Nazi ideology. Nevertheless, 31 stolpersteine have been placed on private property, often in the entry way to a house – for example, in Munich-Schwabing, 19 Franz-Joseph-Strasse, as shown in this photo by my friend Beate Cochlovius. Presently, 150 stolpersteine are in storage at a Munich music academy and are ready to be placed, once permitted.

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The movement to place stolpersteine in Munich is vehemently supported by Terry Swartzberg, an American journalist living there. His website gives details at [email protected] One can only hope that stolpersteine are cared for and that, indeed, are often adopted as projects for school children who go out and polish these brass plaques. Occasionally stones have to be removed temporarily. This happened recently in Lübeck when a stretch of pavement had to be opened and repaired. The stolpersteine were to be replaced later. Regrettably, occasionally stolpersteine are defaced, even besmirched with Nazi emblems, or stolen. Is the theft of a stolperstein ever only a prank or can a stolperstein be irresistible to a souvenir hunter?

(Lie)

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How vividly I remember that fall day in Lübeck when I discovered a couple of stolpersteine in front of the rebuilt synagogue. As I knelt down to photograph and gently touch them, an old man approached us and offered to take my wife and me to a spot across town where six stolpersteine had been imbedded. Regrettably, we didn't have the time to go with him. He told us that he was a Russian Jew now living in Lübeck. His accent lent credence to his story, often interrupted with wailing and moaning "Furchtbar! Furchtbar!" (Terrible! Terrible!). We felt his sense of discomfort at being a survivor. Early on, Demnig was disillusioned and discouraged when he realized that the task of inserting stolpersteine for each one of the more than six million victims of the Nazi tyranny would be impossible. But even a few thousand stolpersteine can have a deep effect on our conscience. Often while working on this piece, there were two German words that went through my mind. One is loaded with contention: Wiedergutmachung, something like “recompense” (literally “make it good again”), which of course is impossible. The other, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, “to deal with the past,” is much more fitting and reflects my humble attempt to lend this contribution against oblivion or forgetting. The German President Theodor Heuss once said that there can't be collective guilt, but there must be forever collective shame for what happened during the Holocaust. At least so one hopes.

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Selected references: Demnig, Gunter in Wikipedia Blumenthal, R: A final goodbye in Berlin. New York Times June 26, 2016 Travel p 1-6 Neue Wache in Wikipedia Deutsche Welle, http://m.dw.com/de/stolpersteine-20-jahre-gedenken-an- ns-opfer/a-19255817?mac a=de-EMail-sharing

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