September 2004
Watch Your Step
Controversy unfolds on Munich's streets
Com'on. Take that picture of mom out of your wallet, pick up a needle and poke out her eyes. Isn't the suggestion enough to make the toughest among you feel queasy? Not just you, but us. I mean
Homo sapiens sapiens in general. The idea that you can affect a person or thing by mutilating an image of it goes back at least 30,000 years, to hunting and fertility scenes painted on cave walls. Günter Demnig's "Stolpersteine" project is another pointer to the primitive magic oozing out of the cracks of modern rationality.
Demnig is a Cologne artist who has taken on the task of commemorating individuals who were killed by the Nazis. He creates small four-by-four-inch brass-topped cobblestones, each with a victim’s name, birth date, deportation location and place of death, if known. The stones are then embedded in the sidewalk in front of the building where the person lived during the Third Reich. He calls them "stumbling stones" because the idea is to force people who come across them to pause for a moment and remember an individual who was killed by the Fascists. The idea has found wide resonance in Germany; more than 3,500 of the plaques, each financed by private donations, are located in 34 cities.
A few weeks ago Munich’s city council decided to withhold permission to put any of the memorials on public grounds. Plaques that had been embedded into sidewalks against this decree were forcibly removed one night without the relatives of the victims being informed.
The mainstream media has carefully interpreted the story so that an assumed dumbed-down public has only two perspectives with which to contend. Bipolarity at its esoteric best. The supporters of white magic, which seeks to heal, squared off against those who feel that black magic could be used to cause harm. The two perspectives, crassly simplified, are:
Perspective one:
The plaques take memory to the streets and embed the remembrance of Nazi butchery in everyday life. By focusing on the individual they put a human face on Nazi terror. In just a few years virtually every memory-quotient measure will show that the remembrance of Nazi terror among the vast majority of Germans stumbling over the stones will be more positive than it was during the reign of monumental memory structures. We are fighting for symbolic memory on the streets today so that we do not have to drive Nazi terrorists out of our houses in the future.
Perspective two:
In time, the plaques are going to accumulate dirt and grime, hardly characteristic of a worthy memorial. What's worse, they are going to produce a conflict with the fanatical right who are well armed with storm trooper boots, spit, tar, faeces and other, more odious pollutants that can be used to damage the stones and debase those who lost their lives. The situation will get messy, inchoate, ugly. The stones will upset the cultural ecology in ways that will haunt and terrorize the city.
So, we have two sides to the story: two right sides! Righteousness has found its way to Munich. Whichever side you are on, the mission is sacrosanct. The righteous don't compromise, don't negotiate, don't wimp out. There is no real interest in consensus. Stubbornness is virtue and strategy. The two parties just say what they believe, relentlessly, repetitively, Rumsfeldtively. The exchange of letters between the Green leader Florian Roth and Christian Ude, Munich's mayor, published in the
Süddeutsche Zeitung shows that we are at the-other-is-guilty-of-moral-turpitude stage. There will be polling (of course), which means we're going to have to choose between belief in white magic or fear of black magic.
It's them or us. Good guys and bad guys. Those with moral sensibility and those without.
It's a set up! Why do we always get sucked in?
Why do we allow political and cultural elites to structure our expectations, provoke in us perceptions of a dichotomous world and then require us to respond favorably to one or the other. It's a massive political and cultural tease. The cultural elite works hard at arousing us, having us see the issue in a dangerous ideological white and black so they can get their names in the media and justify their lordship role in satisfying our need for reassurance and order.
And what does all this magic have to do with real present structures of discrimination? Is there some relation between the money spent on memory preservation and the reduction or increase in prejudice?
We need the necessary realism to see the primitiveness that unites us and contributes to our subservience to the priestly authority of the cultural elite. Then perhaps we can move from magic to politics and turn the issue from ideology to problem solving.
In the long run, isn’t the problem of finding a good restaurant to take mom out to preferable to that as to whether we should be lolling over her picture?
