German town bans ‘stumbling stone’ memorials to Nazi victims

There has been a wave of criticism in Germany after the town of Heidenau, near Dresden in Saxony, decided to ban “stumbling stone” memorials to victims of the Nazis.

Germany’s Education Minister Karin Prien told newspaper Bild that the ban was a “scandal”.

Since the 1990s, many towns in countries across Europe, including in Germany and Austria,have embedded small brass plaques in the streets in memory of Jews and other victims of Nazi atrocities.

The plaques, called Stolpersteine in German, are often placed outside the houses where the victims used to live or work. They are frequently funded by donations.

But now councillors from the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party and the conservative CDU in Heidenau have voted to ban stumbling stones – or “Stolpersteine” in German – in their town.

The AfD in Saxony has been classified as extreme-right by German intelligence, a designation the party rejects.

The motion in the town council said that many citizens felt that this form of commemoration of Nazi victims was inappropriate.

Memorials should in future be placed at the city’s Nordfriedhof cemetery to make it “impossible to step directly onto the memorial elements”, the motion stated.

However, Karin Prien, a member of the CDU, criticised the decision.

“Anyone who banishes Stolpersteine and memorial sites commemorating Jewish life from public spaces to the cemetery is prioritising death over life and rendering Jewish people invisible once again,” she told Bild.

She said her own CDU party in Saxony also bore responsibility for the decision.

Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor and president of the Jewish Community in Munich, said that removing memorials from the cityscape was “completely the wrong approach”.

She told the Funke Media Group that she was “appalled that a democratic party would stoop to supporting such a transparent manoeuvre by the extremists of the AfD”.

Knobloch said that she was not a supporter of the stumbling stones, but added that “decentralised remembrance – which is not banished from public space but, on the contrary, permeates and shapes it” was crucial to a genuine culture of remembrance.

In her own city of Munich, there are no Stolpersteine on municipal land. Instead, the city allows memorial plaques on public buildings.

As the name suggests, Stolpersteine are intended as memorials people stumble upon, making them reflect on the history of their location.

Gunter Demnig, the artist who initiated the Stolperstein project, said that given the recent electoral successes of the AfD “it was certainly to be expected that something like this would happen”.

The AfD recently secured major victories in state elections in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

Some branches of the populist AfD are classed as right-wing extremist by domestic intelligence, a designation the party strongly rejects.

Its anti-immigration, “Germany first” and Russian-friendly agenda has found fertile ground in the country’s former communist east.