Stolperstein

When you walk, run or dawdle round Berlin - or other towns in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and other European countries - you may catch a glint of a bronze cobble stone under your feat. There are around 30,000 Stolperstein (or stumbling stones) in total, 2,900 in Berlin each acting as a memorial of Holocaust victims that died in the concentration camps in Germany and eastern Europe. Into each one, the artist Gunter Demnig has engraved the name, date of birth and date and execution camp of death of the victim, and placed it in the pavement infront of the place where they used to live.

According to the artist (see this Youtube clip), it is a way of giving names back to people who were considered by the Nazi authorities merely by numbers, and providing the ancestors of the victims with a way of remembering them.

For me, this type of memorial is way more powerful than the specific places built to commemorate the atrocity, which you might make one - or maybe two - visits to. Also, it is too much for me to take in and really reflect on while I am there, even the accessible Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, which I have gone back to on a number of occasions. While these cobblestone memorials do not dominate everyday life and tie future generations to the actions of the past, they provide a regular reminder to everyone to ponder in their own time and place.

I don't know quite what I expected when I came to live in Germany. I had heard about the laws banning Nazi salutes and symbols, so I had probably assumed that it would be rarely brought up in conversation. In the UK, the 'don't mention the war' mentality is often still quite strong. But this period of history is not a taboo. Quite the opposite. Learning from the past is a firm part of German education and as you should expect from a couple of generations on, comfortable and serious about discussing it. Like passing the small stones in the street - not weighed down by what went before, but conscious of it.