"Stolpersteine" seit 1997

Gunter Demnig

“Stumbling Blocks”

Brass, concrete, 10cm x 10cm x 10cm

Stumbling blocks is what the sculptor and action artist Gunter Demnig calls the memorial blocks, with which he wants to keep the memory of the victims of national socialist tyranny awake in public space. Since 1997, he embeds concrete blocks into the pavement in front of those houses in which people lived that were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis because of their political opinion, their ancestry, their disability or their sexual orientation.

The inscription on the brass plate informs of their names, their ages and their ways towards death. With a hammer and steel letters, the artist chisels the inscription into the metal and affixes the plate to a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm large concrete block. The block is then embedded into the pavement so that only the brass plate remains visible. Pedestrians can and are only meant to stumble figuratively. So far (June 2010), Gunter Demnig has installed more than 24000 of these memorial blocks in over 500 communities and cities in Germany and elsewhere, 434 of which in Bremen.

In Bremen, the project “Stolpersteine” (“Stumbling Blocks”) is financed by the association “Erinnern für die Zukunft” (“Remembering for the Future”) and the state agency for political education.