Gunter Demnig lives out of a van as he assembles a massive monument to Holocaust victims: stones
They are small brass plaques, about the size of a beer mat, laid into pavements, cobbled paths, driveways and squares all over Germany. On each is recorded the name of a victim of the Nazis - usually, but not always, a Jew exterminated in the Holocaust.
The catch is that they are usually a little unevenly set, so that, as I did, one stumbles. The obvious point is that in having tripped, one looks down, and in looking is made to realise that on that spot once lived an individual among the millions, a particular story among the general tale of horror.
"If you read your history you always see huge numbers, millions were killed," said Torstem Hauschild, one of a group of eight Berliners who banded together to research the stories of six locals who were deported to their deaths at Auschwitz, and who was on hand to see the stolpersteine installed this morning."These stones are about individuals. These people lived here. They are no longer anonymous."
Gunter Demnig is not a historian, nor a builder, though those are chief occupations these days. He is an artist who first came up with the idea in 1993 to commemorate the Roma victims of the Nazis near his home in Cologne.
Soon he was illegally inserting stolpersteine all over the place, in what became a giant installation. So big is the project now that it dominates his life, and he lives nomadically, in his red van, constantly moving to install new plaques. In the next couple of days, he told me, he will install 64 new stones in 16 new locations around Berlin.
"That's on top of the 16,000 stones already laid down, in 356 communities in Germany, as well as Austria, Hungary and the Netherlands," he said."I get home for a day or two from time to time."...