(I wanted to give you a little foretaste of the book that’s coming out on September 8.)
They’re called Stolpersteine, or “stumble-stones,” but it’s not actually that easy to stumble on them. By this I mean not only that one is unlikely to stumble over them—they are set flush with the pavement, and off to the side of the main sidewalk—but also that one doesn’t generally stumble upon them. You practically have to be looking for them to spot them.
When I’m in Berlin I mainly stay in or near the Kreuzberg district, which by now contains over 700 of these little square markers in the ground. Yet it took me decades to run across one on my own, without having it pointed out to me. In fact, it wasn’t until I spent a week in Mitte, which at latest count possesses 943 stumble-stones, that I began to notice them sprinkled near the sidewalks along Swinemünder Strasse, Wolliner Strasse, Brunnenstrasse, and Bernauer Strasse.
Each time I saw one there, I’d stop to read it. The little brass plaques, always in German, followed the same formula over and over again: Here lived So-and-so, born in such-and-such a year, deported on this exact date to this specific camp, murdered on this other exact date. (Not all the deportees died, and even those who survived have been granted the right to a plaque, so some lack the final murder date.) Occasionally there would be a single plaque alone; more often there would be a family of three, or five, or six, with birthdates indicating which were the parents and which were the children.
Researching their history, I learned that these Stolpersteine were the brainchild of a German artist named Gunter Demnig. In the early 1990s, he started by planting a series of these “stones” in Cologne to commemorate the Sinti and Roma who had been deported and murdered by the Nazis. Gradually the project expanded to include any victims of the Third Reich. By the time his idea spread to Berlin, most of those being memorialized turned out to be Jews. Demnig’s basic principle, as described on the Stolpersteine website, was to mark the location of “the last freely chosen residence of the person being commemorated.” In other words, these were the homes where the Jews and other persecuted people lived their lives, not the locations to which they were forcibly relocated—though in Berlin the addresses rarely represent the actual buildings they lived in, because so much has been destroyed and rebuilt since then.
There are thousands of these little brass markers all over the city, but most of them are clustered in the districts where many Jews lived before 1933, like Mitte and Schöneberg and Wilmersdorf. The total quantities for each district, along with the specific addresses where the plaques are located, are listed on the website, but since new stumble-stones can be requested and installed as information becomes available, these statistics are constantly in flux. Occasionally a district or neighborhood may choose to emphasize its own stumble-stones in a special way: a Kreuzberg friend of mine, for instance, wasn’t even aware that he had one on his street until he saw a candle burning on top of it on All Soul’s Day. But for the most part they remain only half-visible, so much a part of the fabric of daily life that people don’t actively notice them.
Once I’d spotted the plaques in Mitte, I became determined to find them nearer my usual haunts. In the course of one two-week period spent on Maybachufer, on the border between Kreuzberg and Neukölln, I began to take photos of all the ones I could locate. On the first day, venturing across the canal, I found them at Paul-Lincke-Ufer 41 (a single brass square for Horst Lothar Koppel), at Kotbusserstrasse 13 (a family of three, the Wolfs), and at Oranienstrasse 66 (a family of six, the Sultans). Koppel was deported but not killed. The two Wolf parents and their six-year-old daughter were all murdered on the same day—May 5, 1942—at the extermination camp in Chelmno. Of the six Sultans, four apparently survived the camps; the other two, of grandparent age, killed themselves (“Selbstmord vor der Deportation”) before they could be deported.
In the following days I took five more photos in the streets near my flat: a family of three, the Peses, at Bürknerstrasse 16; a single person, Elise Poser, at Kottbusser Damm 88–89; a family of five, the Breits, at Schönleinstrasse 28; a family of three, the Adlers, at Friedelstrasse 47; and just down the street, at Friedelstrasse 49, another family, the Heilfrons, consisting of two parents and two children. With the exception of the fifteen-year-old daughter in the Pese household, who “fled to England” in 1939—no doubt as part of the Kindertransport—all of these people were murdered, mainly at Auschwitz and Minsk.
At this point I became too depressed, or maybe just too sad, to continue taking photographs. No passersby looked down at the plaques, not even when I was standing there taking pictures of them, and I couldn’t fault this, because I myself had walked by them often. Elise Poser’s marker, for instance, sits diagonally on the busy corner nearest my local subway entrance, and I had probably passed by it—perhaps even stepped over it—dozens of times. The plaques themselves do not cry out for attention. Only a hand’s-width square, set in close alignment with the others in their group, they are placed off to the side of the pedestrian’s normal path, in the cobblestone strips that separate the concrete sidewalks from the house-fronts. And since most of them are old by now, the weathered brass has little or no metallic sheen to attract the eye, so you are unlikely to spot them even if you are glancing at the ground.
But that unobtrusiveness is finally why I treasure them, probably more than any of Berlin’s numerous other testimonials to its lost Jewish population. Their simplicity is touching in itself, as is their repetitiveness, with the words hier wohnte, deportiert, and ermordet resounding over and over. Even the routinely elegiac phrase “here lived” can acquire a special kind of power when it marks the exact spot where a life started to turn into a death.
I also like that the markers are so egalitarian. Everyone gets the same ten-centimeter square, from the richest department-store owner to the poorest peddler, and everyone gets his or her own square. So despite the overwhelming numbers murdered by the Nazis—a number so huge, in total, that it often beggars the emotions—each doomed person counts separately here. The whole effort feels like a personal response to history, not merely an official one, and that’s probably due in part to its collaborative nature. An artist’s vision, a community’s loss, and a city’s desire to acknowledge that loss have all joined together to create this particular memorial. It’s not quite a spontaneous reaction to a tragedy (the way, say, the shrine to the murdered Ukrainians that went up in front of the Russian embassy in 2022 was), but it manages to retain some of the freshness of spontaneity. As testimony, it feels unfinished and still alive.
* * *
I don’t want you to get the idea that I spend all my time in Berlin thinking about death and destruction. Naturally one cannot be oblivious to it here, and that is surely beneficial. It is admirable, the degree to which the Germans have continued to acknowledge their crimes against humanity, and it is salutary for the rest of us to remember, too. Yet if that were all that Berlin had to offer, I would not feel compelled to keep coming back again and again.
Life, not just death, is the essential lure for me. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the life I find here, the sort that is mingled with an awareness of death, feels especially vital. This kind of hyper-aware existence is not confined to a specific activity. It can involve being alone or together with other people, out on the streets or inside buildings and apartments. But more often than not, it is an existence that includes art.
It has become clear to me, over the years, that one of the main reasons I go to Berlin is to see good paintings—or sculptures, or drawings, or photographs—and hear good music, in which category I include orchestral music, chamber music, grand opera, soloists on street corners, and infinite other variations. This is not just something I happen to do when I am there; it is often the prime motive for my visits. Before arriving, I check out what is happening at the Berlin Philharmonic, the Komische Oper, the Konzerthaus, the Staatsoper, and the Pierre Boulez Saal. I investigate what shows will be on at the Gemäldegalerie, the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Martin-Gropius-Bau, and the other stellar galleries and museums, and even if nothing special is scheduled, I make plans to revisit my favorite paintings.
Sometimes I find, fortuitously, that these art shows or concerts shed light on Berlin’s twentieth-century history, and when this is intelligently done, it adds to my pleasure as an audience member. But that is not why I go to them. I go because the art and music are so outstanding here that they allow the little motor in my brain to stop its eternal spinning and grinding—which is to say, they encourage a receptive, passive version of thinking that is wholly responsive to what I am seeing and hearing. It is not exactly that I forget myself. I am not, I’m afraid, the kind of person who is really capable of that. Nor do I forget that I am in Berlin. In fact, the being-in-Berlin part remains present to me even when I am most engaged in what I am witnessing, in part because Berlin manages to approach these things differently.
Art in Berlin is not escapism from real life. It is continuous with real life, just as the historical monuments and plaques and signs are often continuous with the ongoing bustle of the city. You do not leave the outer world to encounter painting or music here. You bring that outer world with you, and it enriches what you are experiencing in front of the artwork. It is a city in which the notion of an “artist” is as broadly defined as it could possibly be, and while that can be annoying (“Where are the aesthetic standards? How can every piece of crap be counted as art?” I can hear the old farts mumbling—old farts who include, at times, myself), it can also be tremendously enlivening. Contemporary artists from all over the world, including Tacita Dean, Olafur Eliasson, Tomás Saraceno, and Ai Wei Wei, have chosen to settle here, either permanently or temporarily, in part because Berlin and its galleries are so open to various forms of visual expressiveness. The art you’ll find here runs the gamut, from priceless works by Johannes Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch to profuse street graffiti by Anonymous. I adore the Vermeer and de Hooch paintings, and I make a point of visiting them whenever I am in Berlin: there are four of them, two of each, hanging in a single room at the Gemäldegalerie, where I can almost always be alone with them. But even though I of course prefer these Dutch masterpieces to any specific piece of graffiti, I am still glad the graffiti are there. They do no harm to the masterpieces—which are safe in their museum, after all—and they make the process of walking down a Berlin street much more exciting than it would otherwise be. You feel, as so often, that the walls are speaking to you, but this time in their most unofficial voices. Sometimes the artwork on those rough walls is notably skilled; more often it is just there to deliver a message of some kind. But either way, it gives you the sense that the population is alive to its surroundings and filled with the desire to communicate. That these graffiti are for the most part left in place by the authorities is also a testimony to Berlin’s current officialdom. The higher-ups understand just how important free expression is, and they value it over clean walls and orderly rules of behavior. Given the suffering caused in twentieth-century Berlin by a rigid adherence to the principles of order, it is not surprising that the present-day administrators feel a certain relief in permitting graffiti’s harmless version of disorder—harmless but not toothless, because the commentary they contain is often biting, and that adds to their wry appeal.