The vandals certainly chose their date carefully. In the run-up to November 9th, the 69th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogroms, vandals in the Britz neighborhood of southern Berlin prized away 16 so-called Stolpersteine (literally “stumbling blocks”), brass cobblestones commemorating victims of the Nazis. Embedded in sidewalks outside the victims’ former homes, they detail the deportations and deaths (and, occasionally, escapes) under Nazi terror. They mark dwellings of people from persecuted groups, including Jews, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, people with disabilities, and Jehovah’s witnesses. [...]
That the desecration of any Holocaust memorial matters deeply is too obvious to be worth stating. The attacks on these stones are especially painful because Stolpersteine might be among the most powerful monuments to the victims of tyranny yet created. When introduced in the 1990s by artist Gunter Demnig, they offered a privately funded alternative to the tradition of larger-than-life commemorative monuments commissioned by the state (which are often powerful in their own right). Rather than becoming part of a city’s catalog of heritage—places where dignitaries came to lay flowers—these markers distributed around the city force people to integrate the memory of Nazi atrocity into their daily lives. [...]
But why this sudden spike in Berlin? As across Europe, the extreme right is currently on the rise in Germany. On September 24, they even entered Germany’s national parliament in the form of the AfD, an extreme-right party which nonetheless loathes being described that way. There’s no direct evidence to link the rise of the AfD with the Stolpersteine vandalisms. One nauseating detail, however, is that this October, AfD representatives in the borough where the vandalism happened (Neukölln) protested the idea of public funding for Stolpersteine—because concentrating on Nazi victims was supposedly offensive to people who suffered under the East German government, under whose jurisdiction Neukölln never fell. This kind of public denigration of the monuments’ role may not be a direct cause of their vandalism, but it certainly doesn’t help.
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