There is outrage after a small town in eastern Germany banned the installation of a new Holocaust memorial marking the final homes and workplaces of Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution.
“Stolpersteine”, which means “stumbling block”, can be found throughout Germany and other European countries and is meant to serve as a daily reminder of Nazi atrocities.
The motion, proposed by the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), claimed that passersby were “walking over and trampling over the names of the victims”. On Thursday, the city council of Heidenau, a town near Dresden in Saxony, supported the motion.
According to German media reports, the local branch of the political party proposed that future Holocaust commemorations should instead be held at a memorial in the town’s northern cemetery. CNN has reached out to both parties for comment.
The move has sparked a backlash, with opponents arguing that part of the monument’s purpose is a subtle intrusion into everyday life.
This small 10 cm brass cube, often placed on the sidewalk outside homes, is the work of Gunter Demnig, a German artist who started the project in the 1990s.
They all contain similar information such as a person’s name, date of deportation, and place of death. To date, 116,000 plaques have been installed in 31 countries, the majority of them in Germany.
Demnig himself rejected the latest motion in Heidenau. He told German media that the blocks should be visible in specific places where people once lived and worked, and help bring history back to life for young people.
He said he was not surprised by the ban, given the AfD’s recent electoral successes, and said of the CDU: “Maybe the party should remove the letter ‘C’ because they are clearly leaving Christianity behind.”
Felix Banaszak, co-leader of Germany’s Green Party, called it a scandal and said the argument that people were stepping on blocks was “absurd”.
“They bring the names and fates of the victims into our daily lives and invite us to pause for a moment,” he told German media.
Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Bavarian Jewish Association and a Holocaust survivor herself, called the city council’s decision “completely the wrong path.”
In an interview with Germany’s Funke Media Group, she said that although she was no friend of the concept of “Stolperstein,” “decentralized commemorations that are not banished from public space” were key to the country’s culture of remembrance.
The AfD has long objected to Germany’s format for commemorating atrocities committed under Adolf Hitler’s regime.
In the state of Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD recently won its biggest state election ever, a prominent AfD official described the group’s vision for overhauling school history lessons in the state as “less Hitler and more Bismarck.”
At the federal level, the party has been designated as a far-right extremist organization by Germany’s domestic intelligence service, but that designation is currently under review. Individuals within the party have also been accused of extremism.
Apart from the fact that far-right policies have been approved at the local level in Germany, this move reveals a growing problem in German politics. The “Brandmauer” (firewall) maintains an unofficial position that mainstream political parties exclude cooperation with the AfD.
The firewall, aimed at keeping the far right out of political decision-making and curbing its growth, is under severe pressure. The CDU’s willingness to work with the AfD to pass the motion has sparked criticism of the CDU leadership and comes at a time when Chancellor and CDU leader Friedrich Merz is already facing a crisis over his poor performance in recent local elections.
According to Deutsche Welle, the International Auschwitz Commission condemned the CDU’s support of the motion as scandalous.
“This is a clear and despicable attempt to once again drive Heidenau’s Nazi victims out of the city and dispose of them where, according to the AfD, their memory was long ago: in a cemetery,” said the committee’s executive vice president.
