Stolpersteine : Addressing the Victim in Situ

Abstract

“The past is an immense area of stony ground that many people would like to drive across as if it were a motorway, while others move patiently from stone to stone, lifting each one because they need to know what lies beneath.” The Stolpersteine, stumbling stones or blocks laid in pavement, call upon the attentive walker to stop and read what the stones remember, to lift a memory. The stones commemorate all victims of National Socialism between 1933 and 1945, with one block for each victim: Jews, Sinti, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and mentally and/or physically disabled people. They do so at victims’ homes (or, at times, their schools or workplaces) prior to their persecution, flight, or murder, indicating the site at which they lived rather than that at which they died.