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] Follow this and additional works at: http://pubs.lib.umn.edu/joie Part of the Political History Commons 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. Produced by University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing, 2016 1 Journal of Opinions, Ideas, & Essays, Vol. 3 [2016], Art. 3 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 http://pubs.lib.umn.edu/joie/vol3/iss1/3 2 Pierach: Stolpersteine 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 Produced by University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing, 2016 3 Journal of Opinions, Ideas, & Essays, Vol. 3 [2016], Art. 3 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 http://pubs.lib.umn.edu/joie/vol3/iss1/3 4 Pierach: Stolpersteine 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. Produced by University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing, 2016 5 Journal of Opinions, Ideas, & Essays, Vol. 3 [2016], Art. 3 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.