Stumbling blocks

Stumbling blocks


Whoever walks through a city centre in Germany will repeatedly come across brass stones (or brass plates) embedded in the pavement, which remind one of former residents of the buildings in front of them. These stumbling blocks remind of people who had to flee during the Third Reich or were deported and killed. 

Stumbling blocks in the center of Babenhausen, 
picture: A.Murmann CC BY-SA 4.0

The artist Günter Demnig made a start in 1992 when, on the fiftieth anniversary of the deportation order for the Sinti and Roma, he placed a stone with a brass plate in front of Cologne City Hall. The initial lines of the deportation law could be read on the stone. 


Demnig's aim is to give their names to the Nazi victims, who were only listed as numbers in the concentration camps. Bending down to be able to read the texts on the stones should at the same time be a symbolic bow to the victims. Stones with the names and dates of life as well as the fate of the persons have existed in Germany since 1995 - but now also in many other European countries. In Lithuania the first ones were installed in 2017.


For Demnig it is important to bring remembrance from the central memorial sites into people's everyday lives and thus make the victims more visible. This means that no one can bypass the memorials and ignore them. In any case, the stones bring the names of the victims back to the places of their lives - usually to their last place of residence before escape or deportation.