5 ms·

I'll preface this by stating that this is probably not a popular opinion. Notwithstanding the ideals behind the Stolpersteine, they are not exclusively a posit

I'll preface this by stating that this is probably not a popular opinion. Notwithstanding the ideals behind the Stolpersteine, they are not exclusively a positive influence. The problem lies in one of the defining characteristics of this project: the stones are placed in front of the houses where the Jewish victims who got deported and executed lived. This means that if you happen to live in a house tenanted by these unfortuna victims in the past (or even in a new house built where their house was), you can end up with a whole bunch of names permanently staring at you whenever you leave the house. Some, perhaps most, people can ignore that, but for some this constant reminder of pointless death and hardship is quite a burden and can significantly affect their quality of life — should they feel guilty for living? If you speak up about this, you are branded a clueless NIMBY resident or even an anti-Semite (there have been a few of such cases in the Netherlands). Normally, memorials and remembrances are limited in their influence on people's daily life. Memorials are not just placed haphazardly, but with proper consideration of the needs and wants of those who life in the area, as well as the victims and their descendants. A respectful, serene corner of a public park for example. Events where the victims of past conflicts are remembered are limited in time: you can participate or ignore it, and then move on with your life. Stolpersteine however, just get put there in the pavement whether you like it or not. Should people be confronted with the horrors of past conflicts? Absolutely — during education and in locations where this is to be expected and one can open up to consider the actions and consequences of the past — but not everywhere, not constantly, and not exclusively (there are, after all, quite a few horrific things in our recent past, certainly not limited to the fate of deported Jews in the Second World War). Unavoidable, the dead commemorated by Stolpersteine stake out quite a claim on the land of the living. I do find that Stolpersteine presume too much upon the public space to the point of becoming tasteless and an affront.

robert_foss 4y ago
I'm not sure why being reminded of the horrors of the past would make you feel guilty.
- hans1729 4y ago
  "Why does confrontation with horror make you feel uneasy?" ...
  - tokai 4y ago
    guilty != uneasy Don't argue like that. It is very disingenuous.
    - synu 4y ago
      As a meta comment, this sort of verbal judo to put words in peoples mouths is really becoming common. Whenever I see a comment start with something like “It sounds like you are saying” I know I’m in for a wild ride.
  - kome 4y ago
    ok, but so what? sometimes memory has to be painful, it means it feels real, alive. public spaces are naturally a container of public memory, traumas, joy etc. it makes me feel connected with the history of the place, i don't see it as an "affront". And affront to whom??
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  Survivors guilt can be severely debilitating for some people. I can also see folks who are severely depressed, bipolar, or other conditions that involve irrationally strong responses to negative stimulus would be impacted by a constant reminder of horror. I think I agree with the author here - I don’t know I would appreciate my home being marked as the site of an atrocity. Our homes are for the living and the future. It’s good to be aware, and I’m not diminishing the tragedy or the need to keep the memory of it alive to prevent it happening again and to remember the victims. But it feels an awful lot like turning your community into a cemetery, instead of having a cemetery for your community.
  - nlitened 4y ago
    Read enough twitter threads, and you find people for whom eating morning cereal can be severely debilitating. In my opinion, people are able to learn to deal with uncomfortable things in their lives.
IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
I have three stones in front of my house. I clean them once a year. They do not bother me. Personally, I don't quite "get" why other Germans seem to personally suffer under the weight of the county's history. I was born in the 1980s, it is obvious that I am not "guilty", but I have no problem feeling responsible to keep the memory alive. In fact, any reasonable observer will notice that admitting guilt, in the hardest possible terms, has been exceptionally good strategy for the country. Except for the British, and some, but few, Israeli jews, people tend to be impressed with the postwar behavior of the country. Any remnants of fear proved useful to "force" Germany into the Euro and get it of military engagements, although the latter has somewhat stopped. So whenever I see Turkey, or Hungary, or, to some degree, Austria, trying to deny their respective genocides and/or participation in the Holocaust, it just feels exceptionally stupid! Everybody knows of the Turkish genocide against the Armenians. Denying it is silly and just keeps it alive. Build monuments honoring those you have harmed and the world will love you for it. (if, that is, you also stop harming more people! wtf is wrong with you? It's not like land is worth anything, these days, or you-know-who would obviously not need more of it).
kome 4y ago
I was living in Budapest in a house marked with one of the plaques, and I never had a similar thought. What's the mental process that makes you uneasy with them? Very interesting, but puzzling comment. It reality makes me understand how reality can be perceived in wildly different ways. Thank you for it.
synu 4y ago
I assume what you’re feeling is true but it’s a pretty unusual read on the memorial and I’m sure you’re right it is not a popular way to look at it. I suspect that’s why some people jump to assuming there’s some kind of secret agenda - actual anti-Semites use those sorts of arguments as well because they know they can’t say what they really think, and they are surely more common than people who feel guilty about living when forced to see memorials.
jeroen 4y ago
It's not uncommon to have memorials in places where they are very much present in every day life, e.g.: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_verwoeste_stad https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_verwoeste_stad A statue remembering the bombing of Rotterdam, in a busy place in the centre of Rotterdam. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagage_(Leiden) https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagage_(Leiden) A monument in multiple pieces remembering deportation. Most of them are placed in residential areas, in full view of the people who live there.
- Freak_NL 4y ago
  Those are a lot more abstract though, placed in much more considerate locations (I have lived in Leiden myself), and not nearly as numerous. You can tell that a lot of thought went into the planning and realization of these. Having an actual name on it makes it a lot more personal (which is the intent after all), and having hundreds of them all over historic areas of any given town makes it a barrage rather than a subtle reminder.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    Typically not sad things (they celebrate someone who achieved something(s) great) but in the UK one might live somewhere decorated by (literally on the exterior wall) a 'blue plaque'. I realise that's not quite the same, but a similar reminder of someone you don't necessarily want to be reminded of (albeit for probably completely different reasons) who 'lived here'.
currycurry16 4y ago
I live in one of these houses and don't mind. Most of the time, you don't even think about it. In the few moments you do, it's just a reminder of what can go wrong.
igorkraw 4y ago
I gew up close to Nuremberg and like to take a walk to visit the dead whenever I'm there, as well as check out various Nazi grounds which ...are just part of our history. My family is also of polish origin (I was born and raised in Germany) and I've spent time in Cracow and Munich,so I make points of visiting the memorials whenever I visit friends there. My perspective is: this isn't only for the dead, it's also for the living. This can happen again if we do not make a culture of remembering, and of not shying away from the uneasiness. It should make us feel uneasy that our neighbours, our family, ourselves might have participated in the holocaust, or fallen victim to them - that everyone involved was normal people. Having some parts of the land of the living dedicated to this when not even a century has passed is a small price to pay. And as far as prices to pay go, Stolpersteine are literally the least possible intrusion. There would be a similar stone in the same place, the Stolperstein is simply made of a different material and burns the reminder into the city so that holocaust deniers and their ilk have a harder time. And like the name implies, the point is to not have a sanitized, dead, tucked away safely memorial "respectfully" shoved into some corner of a park - where it can be safely ignored. "Never again" is not an empty slogan, or something that will happen automatically (as we can see with genocides and ethnic cleansings around the world continuing since then) it's something that we all have to work towards. The Stolpersteine are part of the Erinnerungskultur and in my opinion, some of the best parts.
ad_hominem 4y ago
[flagged]
- igorkraw 4y ago
  Working as intended indeed,as they draw out anti-semitic comments even if you just discuss them, allowing us to debunk it https://www.facinghistory.org/holocaust-and-human-behavior/chapter-4/myth-jewish-conspiracy https://www.facinghistory.org/holocaust-and-human-behavior/c... and be appropriately distrustful afterwards (for context once flagged, the comment I responded to was spreading a variant of the Elders of Zion "jews try to control us via world government" conspiracy myth)
- dang 4y ago
  We've banned this account for using HN primarily (exclusively, in the last year) for ideological battle. You can't do that here, and race and religious flamewars are particularly unwelcome. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
southerntofu 4y ago
Here's my two cent counter-argument. Captialism is the biggest ruthless killing machine, whatever form it takes: nazism (Hitler was put to power by German industry/bourgeoisie), fascism (Mussolini advocated for State/Capital unification under "corporatism"), State capitalism (USSR was not very different from a people's perspective, with salaried work and gulags and political police), or ordinary liberalism (French republic orchestrated the colonization and slavery of many folks, even long after slavery was formally abolished, under the form of wage slavery). Yet there's little memory of those massacres and injustices, except for casualties of war who get the whole triumphant nationalist ceremonies to spit on them. Maybe a plaque for the dead workers who built a mountain road/rail, or for the victims of the Commune of Paris/Lyon/wherever. It's very discreet, when it exists at all, when it doesn't fall into the narrative of the State. I don't know about younger folks, but when i was in school we got told so little about the history and reasons for these people to have died, when talking about it at all (good luck finding a history teacher spending more than 1 hour on the Paris Commune or the Algerian independence War). And we got told exactly zero about the living popular history of our own neighborhood and how people defied those injustices. Whenever i find a plaque, memorial, carving or whatever remembering the past (and its mistakes) i try to take some time to investigate it, and i often learn something interesting. So much happened right around us, yet we are told/taught so little, and in the cities urban renovation driven by gentrifiers makes sure this history stays hidden and that only advertisement and store fronts remain. Is that really the environment we want: an efficient, emotionless and pastless business machine? I personally don't want that. I wouldn't go so far as to call you a NIMBY resident, but i certainly encourage you to think or read about popular history, gentrification, and what it means when the latter tries to erase the former. As a side note, i don't know about the netherlands, but here in France it's common for neonazis to deface the memorials honoring the (jewish or not, but the jewish in particular) victims of nazism. I agree with you it's bothersome in some sense that jewish victims are honored more than other categories of nazism victims (tsigans, cripples, homosexuals, etc), but if the alternative is to make the neonazis who'd like to rewrite history happy, i'm very happy with the current state of things.
- refurb 4y ago
  Wait, you’re lumping the USSR into “crimes of capitalism”.
flohofwoe 4y ago
> I do find that Stolpersteine presume too much upon the public space to the point of becoming tasteless and an affront. Oh please, they are 10x10 cm (or even smaller), how can they take up "too much public space"? In my street in Berlin there are Stolpersteine almost in front of every house. They are a memorial just as much as they have become integral part of the "environment". In my daily life I don't pay much attention anymore, but sometimes they still make me stop and think, and I guess this was exactly the intent.
bgandrew 4y ago
wow. It's just a 10 cm by 10 cm plate, how can it bother anybody? I guess modern generation just can't stand monuments.
pmcollins 4y ago
fs111 4y ago
I live in such a house. All houses in my street have them. Some have one or two, others have 10+. When we moved here I attended a ceremony across the street when they were putting new ones. During special events throughout the year people are cleaning them, put candles and flowers to remember. It think it is an excellent way to remember and understand our past.

robert_foss 4y ago

I'm not sure why being reminded of the horrors of the past would make you feel guilty.

hans1729 4y ago
"Why does confrontation with horror make you feel uneasy?" ...
- tokai 4y ago
  guilty != uneasy Don't argue like that. It is very disingenuous.
  - synu 4y ago
    As a meta comment, this sort of verbal judo to put words in peoples mouths is really becoming common. Whenever I see a comment start with something like “It sounds like you are saying” I know I’m in for a wild ride.
- kome 4y ago
  ok, but so what? sometimes memory has to be painful, it means it feels real, alive. public spaces are naturally a container of public memory, traumas, joy etc. it makes me feel connected with the history of the place, i don't see it as an "affront". And affront to whom??
fnordpiglet 4y ago
Survivors guilt can be severely debilitating for some people. I can also see folks who are severely depressed, bipolar, or other conditions that involve irrationally strong responses to negative stimulus would be impacted by a constant reminder of horror. I think I agree with the author here - I don’t know I would appreciate my home being marked as the site of an atrocity. Our homes are for the living and the future. It’s good to be aware, and I’m not diminishing the tragedy or the need to keep the memory of it alive to prevent it happening again and to remember the victims. But it feels an awful lot like turning your community into a cemetery, instead of having a cemetery for your community.
- nlitened 4y ago
  Read enough twitter threads, and you find people for whom eating morning cereal can be severely debilitating. In my opinion, people are able to learn to deal with uncomfortable things in their lives.

IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago

I have three stones in front of my house. I clean them once a year. They do not bother me. Personally, I don't quite "get" why other Germans seem to personally suffer under the weight of the county's history. I was born in the 1980s, it is obvious that I am not "guilty", but I have no problem feeling responsible to keep the memory alive. In fact, any reasonable observer will notice that admitting guilt, in the hardest possible terms, has been exceptionally good strategy for the country. Except for the British, and some, but few, Israeli jews, people tend to be impressed with the postwar behavior of the country. Any remnants of fear proved useful to "force" Germany into the Euro and get it of military engagements, although the latter has somewhat stopped. So whenever I see Turkey, or Hungary, or, to some degree, Austria, trying to deny their respective genocides and/or participation in the Holocaust, it just feels exceptionally stupid! Everybody knows of the Turkish genocide against the Armenians. Denying it is silly and just keeps it alive. Build monuments honoring those you have harmed and the world will love you for it. (if, that is, you also stop harming more people! wtf is wrong with you? It's not like land is worth anything, these days, or you-know-who would obviously not need more of it).

kome 4y ago

I was living in Budapest in a house marked with one of the plaques, and I never had a similar thought. What's the mental process that makes you uneasy with them? Very interesting, but puzzling comment. It reality makes me understand how reality can be perceived in wildly different ways. Thank you for it.

synu 4y ago

I assume what you’re feeling is true but it’s a pretty unusual read on the memorial and I’m sure you’re right it is not a popular way to look at it. I suspect that’s why some people jump to assuming there’s some kind of secret agenda - actual anti-Semites use those sorts of arguments as well because they know they can’t say what they really think, and they are surely more common than people who feel guilty about living when forced to see memorials.

jeroen 4y ago

It's not uncommon to have memorials in places where they are very much present in every day life, e.g.: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_verwoeste_stad https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_verwoeste_stad A statue remembering the bombing of Rotterdam, in a busy place in the centre of Rotterdam. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagage_(Leiden) https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagage_(Leiden) A monument in multiple pieces remembering deportation. Most of them are placed in residential areas, in full view of the people who live there.

Freak_NL 4y ago
Those are a lot more abstract though, placed in much more considerate locations (I have lived in Leiden myself), and not nearly as numerous. You can tell that a lot of thought went into the planning and realization of these. Having an actual name on it makes it a lot more personal (which is the intent after all), and having hundreds of them all over historic areas of any given town makes it a barrage rather than a subtle reminder.
- OJFord 4y ago
  Typically not sad things (they celebrate someone who achieved something(s) great) but in the UK one might live somewhere decorated by (literally on the exterior wall) a 'blue plaque'. I realise that's not quite the same, but a similar reminder of someone you don't necessarily want to be reminded of (albeit for probably completely different reasons) who 'lived here'.

currycurry16 4y ago

I live in one of these houses and don't mind. Most of the time, you don't even think about it. In the few moments you do, it's just a reminder of what can go wrong.

igorkraw 4y ago

I gew up close to Nuremberg and like to take a walk to visit the dead whenever I'm there, as well as check out various Nazi grounds which ...are just part of our history. My family is also of polish origin (I was born and raised in Germany) and I've spent time in Cracow and Munich,so I make points of visiting the memorials whenever I visit friends there. My perspective is: this isn't only for the dead, it's also for the living. This can happen again if we do not make a culture of remembering, and of not shying away from the uneasiness. It should make us feel uneasy that our neighbours, our family, ourselves might have participated in the holocaust, or fallen victim to them - that everyone involved was normal people. Having some parts of the land of the living dedicated to this when not even a century has passed is a small price to pay. And as far as prices to pay go, Stolpersteine are literally the least possible intrusion. There would be a similar stone in the same place, the Stolperstein is simply made of a different material and burns the reminder into the city so that holocaust deniers and their ilk have a harder time. And like the name implies, the point is to not have a sanitized, dead, tucked away safely memorial "respectfully" shoved into some corner of a park - where it can be safely ignored. "Never again" is not an empty slogan, or something that will happen automatically (as we can see with genocides and ethnic cleansings around the world continuing since then) it's something that we all have to work towards. The Stolpersteine are part of the Erinnerungskultur and in my opinion, some of the best parts.

ad_hominem 4y ago

[flagged]

igorkraw 4y ago
Working as intended indeed,as they draw out anti-semitic comments even if you just discuss them, allowing us to debunk it https://www.facinghistory.org/holocaust-and-human-behavior/chapter-4/myth-jewish-conspiracy https://www.facinghistory.org/holocaust-and-human-behavior/c... and be appropriately distrustful afterwards (for context once flagged, the comment I responded to was spreading a variant of the Elders of Zion "jews try to control us via world government" conspiracy myth)
dang 4y ago
We've banned this account for using HN primarily (exclusively, in the last year) for ideological battle. You can't do that here, and race and religious flamewars are particularly unwelcome. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

southerntofu 4y ago

Here's my two cent counter-argument. Captialism is the biggest ruthless killing machine, whatever form it takes: nazism (Hitler was put to power by German industry/bourgeoisie), fascism (Mussolini advocated for State/Capital unification under "corporatism"), State capitalism (USSR was not very different from a people's perspective, with salaried work and gulags and political police), or ordinary liberalism (French republic orchestrated the colonization and slavery of many folks, even long after slavery was formally abolished, under the form of wage slavery). Yet there's little memory of those massacres and injustices, except for casualties of war who get the whole triumphant nationalist ceremonies to spit on them. Maybe a plaque for the dead workers who built a mountain road/rail, or for the victims of the Commune of Paris/Lyon/wherever. It's very discreet, when it exists at all, when it doesn't fall into the narrative of the State. I don't know about younger folks, but when i was in school we got told so little about the history and reasons for these people to have died, when talking about it at all (good luck finding a history teacher spending more than 1 hour on the Paris Commune or the Algerian independence War). And we got told exactly zero about the living popular history of our own neighborhood and how people defied those injustices. Whenever i find a plaque, memorial, carving or whatever remembering the past (and its mistakes) i try to take some time to investigate it, and i often learn something interesting. So much happened right around us, yet we are told/taught so little, and in the cities urban renovation driven by gentrifiers makes sure this history stays hidden and that only advertisement and store fronts remain. Is that really the environment we want: an efficient, emotionless and pastless business machine? I personally don't want that. I wouldn't go so far as to call you a NIMBY resident, but i certainly encourage you to think or read about popular history, gentrification, and what it means when the latter tries to erase the former. As a side note, i don't know about the netherlands, but here in France it's common for neonazis to deface the memorials honoring the (jewish or not, but the jewish in particular) victims of nazism. I agree with you it's bothersome in some sense that jewish victims are honored more than other categories of nazism victims (tsigans, cripples, homosexuals, etc), but if the alternative is to make the neonazis who'd like to rewrite history happy, i'm very happy with the current state of things.

refurb 4y ago
Wait, you’re lumping the USSR into “crimes of capitalism”.

flohofwoe 4y ago

> I do find that Stolpersteine presume too much upon the public space to the point of becoming tasteless and an affront. Oh please, they are 10x10 cm (or even smaller), how can they take up "too much public space"? In my street in Berlin there are Stolpersteine almost in front of every house. They are a memorial just as much as they have become integral part of the "environment". In my daily life I don't pay much attention anymore, but sometimes they still make me stop and think, and I guess this was exactly the intent.

bgandrew 4y ago

wow. It's just a 10 cm by 10 cm plate, how can it bother anybody? I guess modern generation just can't stand monuments.

pmcollins 4y ago

fs111 4y ago

I live in such a house. All houses in my street have them. Some have one or two, others have 10+. When we moved here I attended a ceremony across the street when they were putting new ones. During special events throughout the year people are cleaning them, put candles and flowers to remember. It think it is an excellent way to remember and understand our past.