In the 1990s, a German artist began to place cobblestone-sized brass markers on the sidewalks of German cities, each one commemorating a single victim of the Nazis who lived nearby. Now over 40,000 of these Stolpersteine (stumbling-stones) can be found throughout several European countries. The German town of Villingen, however, has repeatedly refused to take part. Lisa Lampert-Weissig writes:
It is . . . precisely the possibility of people encountering the history of Villingen’s Jews at every turn . . . that has led some civic leaders to reject the Stolpersteine, first in 2004 and then again at the end of 2013. Prominent local politician Renate Breuning, who belongs to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel, carefully explained her opposition to the Stolpersteine in the local paper . . . in 2004. Breuning expressed concern that marking the sidewalk in front of specific homes might give the impression that their current owners benefited financially from the Third Reich’s theft of Jewish property. Noting that there were already memorials to Villingen’s Jews, Breuning further argued that it was time to stop creating new memorials and to allow Germans to go about their day-to-day existence without having to confront the past.
A decade later Breuning appears fed up with the controversy, and her careful discourse has devolved into vulgarity. According to the . . . Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, soon after the 2013 vote Breuning responded to a reporter’s query about the Stolpersteine with a crude sexualized expression, asserting that the controversy was of no concern to anyone outside the local community.
Read more on Tablet: http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/191167/vanished-stumbling-stones