You see those words all over the parts of Berlin we tromped around in, and it is sobering.
You get the sense in that great old city that this has been a psychologically hard place to live. I know from books and film footage how bad things were in the city during the war. I’ve read about the divided city and remember the Wall falling. I’ve been to the Holocaust Museum in D.C. and seen historical footage.
It isn’t history or grainy footage or an abstraction when you’re there.
“The past intrudes into our society,” said Wolfgang Thierse, president of the Bundestag.
Now I’ve seen the bullet holes in the buildings. I toured the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, documenting the East Germans who conceived incredible ways to get across to West Berlin. I read there about the frustrations of oppressed East Germans who didn’t get the support from the West they’d hoped for during the uprising in 1953. We met people in Berlin who grew up in East Germany, of course. One guy told us about how his mother, who was an East German tour guide, was disciplined for once calling it the Wall. (East Germans said “the anti-fascist protection barrier” was for keeping out spies.)
The city is living with a lot. Pick any emotion. That burden must be heavy.
And then you see these:
Those are stolpersteine, “stumbling blocks.” The monuments, created Gunter Demnig, commemorate a victim of Nazi oppression. They remember individuals – those who died, survived or emigrated – who were condemned to prisons, euthanasia facilities, sterilization clinics, concentration camps and extermination camps.
Jews, Christians, gypsies, homosexuals, blacks, communists, the disabled, they’re all represented by stolpersteine. More than 48,000 have been laid in 18 countries. You see them all over Berlin. (And in some cities they are still, apparently, somewhat contentious.)
Hier wohnte means here lived. Ermordet means murdered.
