Stumbling Stones

In certain areas of the city, the sidewalks are scattered with small copper colored plaques about the size of my fist. These stumble stones are carved with names and dates, marking the location of where the homes of Nazi victims once stood and where their lives once flourished. Some of these stones are under newly erected apartment buildings, or next to high traffic roads where residents no longer lived. Some stand alone in a long stretch of sidewalk and some line up one after another, densely packed into a square block. At each site, it’s an exercise on the imagination to tear down the modern city layout and reconstruct a pre WWII neighborhood where these homes once stood.

Where today a plaque may be outside of a poorly fenced empty lot, overgrown with vegetation, the dynamics must have been quite different seventy some years ago. I want to imagine that the shrubberies were cut back from the old brick walls and the graffiti vanished. I would have liked the think that the streets were crowded with locals, tending to their own business, but without first stopping for a chat with a neighbor, or milkman, or barber. I want to feel the richness in diversity of this block through music, food and laughter. But these are my own selfish fantasies, created mostly to avoid thoughts about what happened when the owners of this land were forced to leave behind their homes. I dread thinking about how the streets of Berlin were cleansed and sterilized of those who were not of the Aryan Race, and how their properties may have been taken, pillaged, torn down, bombed, desolated, flattened, and left alone until the city was rebuilt, first after the war, then after the unification of Germany.

Although these stones are small and do not obstruct the path like an erected sculpture, knowing the meaning behind these stones draws the attention of passerbys. These small singular memorials are present in your everyday life. As you go about your daily tasks, walking to work…going to a party, when you stumble upon this small reminder that someone who once inhabited here endured one of the most unstomchable crimes in history, it pulls you closer to society. It is not just a reminder of the unfortunate events in German history. These small stones allow you to reflect on present. Who are we forcing out from their homes? What will we make disappear in our lifetime that will serve as a lesson, a warning, to the next generation? How will our actions today, as an individual or community change the social landscape around us?

These thoughts and others overwhelm me as I walk down the sidewalk of Berlin and come across a copper-colored plaque about the size of my fist.