Heidenau authorities have banned the installation of “stumbling blocks”

Author, Bethany Bell

Place of work, BBC Correspondent in Germany

Published a minute ago

Reading time: 3 min

The authorities of the city of Heidenau in the German state of Saxony have banned the installation of so-called “stumbling blocks” - metal plaques mounted on the pavement with the names of people who became victims of the Nazi regime. This decision caused a wave of indignation in Germany.

This is an adapted translation of material published on the BBC News website. The original in English can be read here.

Memorial plaques appear in houses where Jews and others who died at the hands of the Nazis or were persecuted lived or worked.

This practice began to spread throughout Europe, including Germany and Austria, from the early 1990s; Often such memorials are erected through charitable donations.

However, now Heidenau local council deputies from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) have decided to ban the installation of new signs.

They decided that in the future the memory of the dead should be honored in the city cemetery, so that it would be “impossible to directly walk on the memorial elements.”

The city council explains that many local residents felt that this was an inappropriate way to memorialize the dead.

Banishing memory from public space?

German Education Minister Karin Prien called the ban a “scandal” in an interview with Bild newspaper.

“Whoever removes Stolpersteine ​​(“stumbling blocks” in German) and other places of memory of Jewish life from public space, consigning them to the cemetery, gives priority not to life, but to death. And again it makes the Jewish people invisible,” the minister said.

Prien, who is herself a member of the CDU, said that members of the party's organization in Saxony were responsible for the decision.

Holocaust survivor Charlotte Knobloch, head of Munich's Jewish community, called the plaque ban "a completely wrong approach."

She told Funke Media Group that she was “outraged that the Democratic Party would go so far as to support such a clear maneuver by AfD extremists.”

German intelligence has classified the AfD branch in Saxony as an extremist organization, but the party disputes this assessment.

Knobloch says that she herself does not support the installation of “stumbling blocks”, but advocates “a decentralized memory that is not expelled from public space, but which, on the contrary, permeates this space and shapes it.”

In Munich, where Knobloch lives, there are no “stumbling blocks” on city-owned land. But municipal authorities allow memorial plaques to be placed on various buildings.

Stumbling Blocks, as their name suggests, are designed to make people stop and think about the history of the place where they find themselves.