Outrage as East German town bans Holocaust ‘stumbling blocks’
By Sebastian Shukla, Sophie Tanno, CNN
(CNN) — There has been outrage after a small town in eastern Germany banned the installation of new Holocaust memorial plaques that mark the last known residence or workplace of Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution.
‘Stolpersteine,’ meaning ‘stumbling blocks’, are found across Germany, as well as in other European countries, and are intended as a daily reminder of Nazi atrocities.
The motion was proposed by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), who argued that passersby are “walking over or even stepping onto the names of the victims.” On Thursday, the city council of Heidenau, a town near Dresden in Saxony, backed the motion.
The parties’ local branches instead proposed that future Holocaust commemorations should be kept at the town’s memorial site at its northern cemetery, German media report. CNN has approached both parties for comment.
The move has sparked backlash, with opponents arguing that part of the purpose of the memorials is their subtle intrusion into everyday life.
The small 10cm brass cubes, often installed in sidewalks outside residential homes, are the work of German artist Gunter Demnig who initiated the project in the 1990s.
They all carry similar information, such as the individual’s name, date of deportation, and place of death. To date 116,000 plaques have been installed across 31 countries, the vast majority are in Germany.
Demnig himself has rejected the recent motion in Heidenau. Speaking to German media, he said that the blocks must be visible in the specific locations where people used to live or work, and that they help bring history to life for young people.
He said he was not surprised by the ban, given the AfD’s recent electoral successes, and said of the CDU that the party “should perhaps drop its ‘C’. Because they’ve clearly left Christianity behind.”
Felix Banaszak, co-leader of Germany’s Green Party, described it as a scandal and said that the reasoning that people were stepping on the blocks was “absurd.”
“They bring the names and fates of the victims into our everyday lives and prompt us to pause for a moment,” he told German media.
Charlotte Knobloch, the president of a Jewish association in Bavaria and a Holocaust survivor herself, described the town council’s decision as the “completely wrong path.”
Speaking to Germany’s Funke Media Group, she said that while she herself was not a friend of the ‘Stolpersteine’ concept, “decentralized commemoration that is not banished from public spaces” is key for the country’s culture of remembrance.
The AfD has long challenged Germany’s forms of commemoration of the atrocities committed under Adolf Hitler.
In Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD recently sealed it best-ever win in state elections, a prominent AfD official described their vision to overhaul the state’s school history lessons as “more Bismark – less Hitler.”
On a federal level, the party was designated as a far-right extremist organization by German domestic intelligence, although that designation is currently under review. Individuals within the party have also been accused of being extremists.
Aside from the fact that a far-right policy has been approved at the local level in Germany, the move lays bare a growing issue in German politics; adherence to the ‘Brandmauer,’ or firewall, an informal position for mainstream parties that sees them rule out cooperation with the AfD.
This firewall, which is designed to keep the far right out of political decision making and stifle their growth, is under serious pressure. The CDU’s willingness to work together with the AfD to pass this motion has sparked criticism of the CDU leadership and comes at a time when the Chancellor and CDU leader Friedrich Merz is already facing a crisis over poor performances in recent regional elections.
The International Auschwitz Committee slammed the CDU’s support of the motion as scandalous, according to Deutsche Welle.
“This is a transparent and despicable attempt to drive Nazi victims in Heidenau out of the city once again and dispose of them where, according to the AfD, their memory has belonged a long time ago — at the cemetery,” the committee’s executive vice president said.
The-CNN-Wire
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