The Forward: German city bans stumbling stone memorials to Nazi victims
This is disturbing.
Teaching history, and even feeling a certain amount of contrition about your people’s past, shouldn’t be an obstacle to pride. If anything it can make your love for your people richer, because it’s part of making it better. Sounds sappy, but where’s the lie?
And yet over and over again, men without real respect for themselves, men with some gnawing hole in their soul, think that things like Stolpersteine are designed to make them smaller and less magnificent. But no stone can do that. Only you can do that.
Really this policy has less to do with individual feelings and more to do with its usefulness to rally a base. The Heidenau city council members might not really care about pride and shame, but they can play off people’s sense of it to build power.
I recommend Clint Smith’s 2022 article about Stolpersteine and slavery, “Monuments to the Unthinkable.”