Pre-Site Visit Reflection:
Gunter Demnig constructed a memorial in 1992 to commemorate the 1,000 Cologne Roma and Sinti who were taken to the city center on May 6, 1940, for deportation to extermination camps. Demnig created a single bronze monument etched with the deportation order and placed it in the municipal square in front of Cologne City Hall. The plaque includes the victim’s name, date of birth, deportation date and place and death date.
This was the first of 17 million brass memorial bricks set around Europe, each identifying a single victim of the German Nazi reign of terror the stones lay outside of the houses of the last freely chosen place where they lived. All people who suffered under the National Socialist regime are remembered through these stones: Jews, Sinti and Roma, politically persecuted, religiously persecuted, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, mentally and/or physically disabled people, and forced labourers.
Demnig later laid a few additional Stumbling Stones in Cologne and Berlin without municipal permission. Only in 1997 did cities in Germany and Austria begin to offer authorization for laying memorial tiles.
Since the stones are positioned where people walk and congregate, they tend to accumulate dirt. In Germany, specific days have been chosen to clean and polish the little brass memorials: International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 and Kristallnachton November 9.
Not everyone agrees with the use of markers. Some groups and communities have been vocal about their objection to the stumbling stones. Charlotte Knobloch, a prominent member of Munich’s Jewish community, has been one of the project’s harshest detractors. She believes that placing the memorial stones “underfoot,” to be stepped on, is insulting to the victims’ memories. Due to this and other criticisms, no more stumbling stones have been planted on Munich’s public streets, while some have been placed in the city’s private walks and doors.
Since people see the memorials regularly in daily life in the cities where these are present, it sparks conversation even when people are not already thinking about the shoah, which keeps the dialogue open and the memory alive. We will see these memorials throughout our trip just passing by or when we go to seek them out. These memorials are more personal and do a great job of humanizing the victims of the holocaust and showing people the scale and spread as well as it is not a topic that can be ignored.
Post-Site Visit Reflection:
The Stumbling Stones were the first memorial we encountered on the trip, as they are such a widespread and abundant form of memorialization. The stones were placed right outside the hostel that we were staying at while in Berlin and quickly showed us that this topic can not be ignored in Europe. I was extremely disappointed that not all the stumbling stones had been cleaned. Some of the stumbling stones we saw were tarnished and dirty despite being supposed to be cleaned on Yom HaShoah, which was only weeks prior. Seeing the stones that weren’t shining and hardly noticeable provided insight into the argument of the memorials being ineffective and easily forgotten or disrespected. The unclean stumbling stones were disheartening, but I do still believe that the stumbling stones provide a crucial reminder of the scale and spread of the victims of the Shoah. Since the completion of the trip stumbling stones in Germany and Austria have been defaced. https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-788002 This article goes further in depth about the graffiti that took place in Vienna.
These are the stumbling stones that were defaced in Germany. For further information on the antisemitism spreading though memorials visit this site: https://www.thejc.com/news/world/thugs-scrawl-jews-are-criminals-on-holocaust-memorial-stones-in-germany-p55mfbu2 .
Citations:
https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/stumbling-stones-holocaust-memorials
https://www.npr.org/2012/05/31/153943491/stumbling-upon-miniature-memorials-to-nazi-victims