Elections!

About a month ago, large A2 photos of beaming people started appearing on every streetpost. They look very friendly, I thought, I wonder what they want? Answer: my vote on the 18th September, when Berlin goes to the polls to choose their local political representatives, who then in turn will vote for the Mayor of Berlin.

As these are local elections, I can as a EU citizen take part in them. But who do I choose? Almost knowingly the next volley of posters appeared with some clear manifesto commitments, which the parties presumably hoped would set them apart from each other. 'No' to privatisation of the S-bahn, fewer 30km an hour speed limits and minimum wage in all sectors (which, as a waitress, would be most welcome). The Piraten Party as you might expect took a slightly different tack - instead of proposing solutions in their posters, they simply promised to ask the questions and listen to our solutions.

For a bit more in-depth understanding of the parties and their politics, there are a couple of good on-line tools. The first (here) allows you to 'agree', 'disagree' or be 'neutral' against 30 or so main policies. It then matches you with your most similar parties, and then gives you a break down of how each party voted on each issue, from voting from 16 years old, to civil partnerships being given the same status as marriage, to quotas for women in management boards, to tax on hotel stays, to crackdown on far right and far left extremism, and to the preservation of the Templehof airport as a green space. This one gives a more detailed still breakdown on what each of the local candidates for your neighbourhood thinks on each of the issues.

With just two weeks to go, the parties have been bringing out the big guns too. Although not directly voted for, the mayoral candidates have a huge influence over how people vote locally. So there are huge posters across the city of Claus Wowereit, the incumbant SPD Mayor, and Renate Künast, the Green Party candidate, who at one point looked strong enough to follow Stuttgart in having a green majority, but is now wavering in the polls. And Angela Merkel has been throwing her support behind the CDU candidate.

Despite being local elections, Germany's federal set up makes these as important as national elections. With visible and well thought out marketing strategies, and Sunday voting, there is a clear drive to gain maximum voter turnout. Although it has been decreasing over the past few years, turnout across Germany is above 70% in federal elections, compared to around 65% in UK general elections (it has been as low as 59%) and only 38% in local elections.

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.