One German's Personal Holocaust Project

Cologne-based German artist Gunter Demnig was born in 1947, two years after the demise of the Third Reich. While he claims that members of his family, including his regular German army veteran father, had no involvement in the Holocaust, Demnig still feels that he bears a responsibility as a German to never let the world forget what happened during the Hitler years.

Gunter Demnig

In 1988, while working on a memorial monument for Gypsies murdered in the Holocaust, an elderly Cologne resident questioned his motives, claiming that no Gypsies had ever lived in Cologne or anywhere near the site of his monument. This led Demnig to research his home city's history. In the process, he found records of Gypsies as well as Jews who had once lived in residences throughout Cologne prior to and during the Hitler years.

He began walking the streets of Cologne locating houses, flats, and places of business where individual murdered Jews, Gypsies, and anti-Hitler resistance fighters had once lived. During his walks, he realized that creating a memorial plaque for each individual and placing the plaque near the former homes or businesses of these individuals could have a more powerful humanizing impact than the many existing German monuments to the nameless millions of victims of the Nazi regime.

Stolpersteines

Demnig was moved to delve deeper into Cologne's history and began working with German Holocaust archivists to not only match names with places, but to also discover where, when, and how each individual was murdered. He called his individual 4" by 4" memorial brass plates "Stolpersteines", roughly translated as "stumbling blocks." Most of these plaques would be engraved with the murdered individual's name, date of birth, date of deportation, and date and destination where he or she was killed.

"Six million is an incomprehensible figure," he's said, "But to carve the name of a single person on a single marker is to say, 'Look, this individual lived - lived right here at this actual address.'"

In 1996, he embedded his first Stolpersteine in the pavement in front of a house in Cologne where a Jewish family once lived.

Resistance

Demnig, however, hasn't always been welcomed with open arms. When he attempted to lay two plaques in Munich, city officials had them removed. Although Munich has a large Holocaust memorial, city officials as well as some Jewish community leaders felt that individual plaques would attract desecration by neo-Nazis.

Leipzig is another large German city that wouldn't allow Gunter Demnig to embed his memorial plaques.

In all fairness to these authorities, some embedded Stolpersteines have been pulled out of the pavement by neo-Nazis as well as outraged neighbors who feel that they needn't be reminded of the horrors of the past. In some towns where there's still a strong far right-wing presence, Demnig has even had to have a police escort protect him while he installs plaques.

His Legacy

As of 2008, Gunter Demnig has placed over 12,000 Stolpersteines in approximately 270 German cities and towns, some at the request of families of Holocaust victims. For those interested in memorializing a lost family member, he can be contacted at his web site. The cost for an individual engraved brass plaque, including installation, is 95 Euros (approximately $122).

Once an important installation artist, Demnig now considers his Stolpersteines to be his life's work. His individual memorials have been requested in Austria, the Czech Republic, and Hungary.