A German artist has now laid more than 70,000 Stolpersteine stones, making them the world’s largest decentralised monument to the Holocaust – but not everyone approves

On a recent winter afternoon, several dozen residents of Duisburger Strasse in Berlin huddled together to commemorate the people on their street who died in the Holocaust. To Volker Spitzenberger, who has lived here since 2010 with his husband, the stories of local residents killed by the Nazis were a chilling reminder of past atrocities – but none more so than when the organiser mentioned Manfred Hirsch, a young boy who was deported at the age of four from the house at No 18.

“That’s our house,” Spitzenberger said, with a sharp intake of breath.

Monuments of remembrance are ubiquitous in Berlin. The city has at least 20 memorials to victims of the Holocaust – most notably Peter Eisenman’s vast 19,000-sq metre Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

But the memorial envisioned for Hirsch is different. Just under 10 sq cm, it might be easy to miss: a small brass stone, embedded directly underfoot, in the cobblestones of the street.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A flower laid on an individual Stolperstein in Berlin. Photograph: (c) Sean O’Connor

Known as “Stolpersteine”, or “stumbling stones”, there are now more than 70,000 such memorial blocks laid in more than 1,200 cities and towns across Europe and Russia. Each commemorates a victim outside their last-known freely chosen residence.

The stones represent a new vision of urban remembrance. If Eisenman’s large monument, set in the governmental heart of Berlin, emphasises the scale and political culpability of the Holocaust, the Stolpersteine focus on its individual tragedies.

The inscription on each stone begins “Here lived”, followed by the victim’s name, date of birth, and fate: internment, suicide, exile or, in the vast majority of cases, deportation and murder.

To read the stone, you must bow before the victim Michael Friedrichs-Friedländer

Together, the Stolpersteine now constitute the largest decentralised monument in the world.

“I find it much more moving than these colossal or labyrinthine memorials, which to me feel quite bombastic and anonymous,” says Marion Papi, a translator and writer who also lives a few doors down from Spitzenberger on Duisburger Strasse. “The Stolpersteine are so much more vivid and personal.”

The idea was first conceived by artist Gunter Demnig in Cologne in 1992 as part of an initiative commemorating Roma and Sinti victims of the Holocaust. He installed the first Berlin Stolperstein four years later.

He has now laid over 70,000 stones, personally overseeing the wording and installation of each one. The task keeps him on the road for 300 days a year.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A group of Berliners at a Stolpersteine cleaning initiative. Photograph: Sean O’Connor

“A person is only forgotten when his or her name is forgotten,” he often says, citing the Talmud.

Today, the Stolpersteine exist in 20 languages and 24 countries. In 2017, the Pestalozzi school in Buenos Aires became the first site outside Europe to host one, honouring hundreds of German Jewish children who found refuge there in exile.

Unlike some other memorials that focus on specific persecuted groups, the Stolpersteine honour all victims of the Nazi regime, including Jewish, Sinti, Roma, disabled, dissident, and Afro-German and “asocial” citizens. The 70,000th Stolperstein was laid for Willy Zimmerer, a German man with learning disabilities murdered at Hadamar psychiatric hospital outside of Frankfurt.

Despite its vast and international scope, the Stolpersteine remain a grassroots initiative. Local groups – often residents of a particular street, or schoolchildren working on a project – come together to research the biographies of local victims, and to raise the €120 it costs to install each stone.

On Duisburger Strasse, Norbert and Astrid Wollschäger invited everyone in their apartment building to join in. About half agreed.

“We would go in pairs to the archives,” says Wollschläger. “It really knocks it out of you.” The Nazis kept meticulous records, he says. “Right down to the last silver spoon a victim left behind.”

Though emotionally exhausting, the project bonded the Wollschlägers closer to their neighbours. “We met regularly and talked about our progress. It made our building feel like a community.”

Before they proceed, organisers must track down as many of the victim’s relatives as they can to ask for their approval, and to invite them to the installation ceremony. Dietmar Schewe, 67, a retired school principal, welcomed 25 visitors from Israel to the ceremony before his building.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A candle and roses laid on a set of Stolpersteine in Berlin at a commemorative ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Photograph: Eliza Apperly

“The apartments still have many of their original features, so the guests could really imagine ‘my great grandmother held this door handle’,” Schewe says. “It felt like a small but important encounter with the lived environment of their relatives.”

Not everyone is convinced by the Stolpersteine. Charlotte Knobloch, head of the Jewish community in Munich and Bavaria, has strongly opposed the project. Knobloch, who survived the Holocaust in hiding with a Christian family, finds the placement of Stolpersteine underfoot to be unacceptable.

“It is my firm belief that we need to do everything we can in order to make sure that remembrance preserves the dignity of the victims,” she has said.

“For me, stumbling over a piece of metal in the ground is anything but dignified.”

In a controversial move, Stolpersteine were banned by Munich city council in 2004. The decision was upheld in 2015, despite more than 100,000 people signing a petition in favour of them. Last summer, Munich introduced an alternative remembrance project, also placed before a victim’s last home, but presenting biographic plaques and photographs on stainless steel columns.

For Michael Friedrichs-Friedländer, 69, the craftsman who makes each Stolperstein, criticism of the project is unwarranted. “I can’t think of a better form of remembrance,” he says. “If you want to read the stone, you must bow before the victim.”

Friedrichs-Friedländer has inscribed every single Stolperstein since 2005, when the growing scale of the project meant Demnig no longer had time both to make and install the stones.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In the studio of Michael Friedrichs-Friedländer, the craftsman who engraves each Stolperstein by hand. Photograph: Eliza Apperly

In his small garage in the north-eastern suburbs of Berlin, Friedrichs-Friedländer engraves each stone by hand, letter by letter, with a hammer and hand-held metal stamps. He works mostly alone and in silence, six days and at least 50 hours a week. In total, he has inscribed more than 63,000 Stolpersteine.

Despite several proposals to mechanise the process, Friedrichs-Friedländer insists it remain manual. “To show respect for the victims, it must be done by hand,” he says during a brief cigarette break. “The Holocaust was so systematic. What they invented as means of mass slaughter, it was more or less automatised. We don’t want anything like that.”

The work can be devastating, such as the time he inscribed 34 Stolpersteine to be placed outside a former Jewish orphanage in Hamburg. But Friedrichs-Friedländer feels compelled to continue by what he sees as a moral and political imperative, all the more so in face of an ascendant far-right in Germany and across Europe.

“I feel responsibility,” says Friedrichs-Friedländer. “When you know the history and see what’s happening today, there’s just so many parallels.”

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