MONUMENTS TO THE UNTHINKABLE
This morning I read a November 14 New Yorker article entitled “Monuments to the Unthinkable”. The writer, Clint Smith, was examining the removal of memorial to Civil War Confederate heros and what further steps are being made to identify with markers the huge wrong of slavery in the United States which the Civil War was about. This got him to wondering what Germany had done in the aftermath of the holocaust to prevent people from forgetting the murder of so many Jews and other marginal groups and remembering the lives of the people who were killed.
This led him to tour Germany and to examine the many ways in which Germans, often community groups rather than the government, had erected memorials of one kind or another.
It turned out that there were many ways, including making concentration camps into museums of the horrors that had happened there and personalizing the people who had died there. But the memorial he found most moving was the placement of little copper plates called Stolperstein or stumble stones in the sidewalk in front of places where Jews who were murdered lived before the Nazi time. On the copper plate, all hand stamped, was the name of the person, their birthdate, when arrested and when and where they were murdered. For him this personalized the people and was more more harrowing than the larger abstract memorials such as the field of black stone blocks in the center of Berlin, The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe”. A single German artist, Gunter Demnig, began placing these Stoperstein to memorialize Jews who had lived in his section of Berlin, and it spread through Germany because of community rather than government action.
The two Stolperstein that have affected me the most are the ones that are in front of the house where my brother-in-law, Volker Schrader, who died a few years ago, lived. A Jewish doctor and his wife had once lived in the apartment that he had bought and fixed up and was so proud of.
Several years ago my son and I made a road trip straight south to the gulf coast and along the way we stopped at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, founded by Bryan Stevenson. The museum tells the story of slavery in the United States but the part that touched me most intensely was a building with hundreds of ten foot high red rusted metal rectangular columns hanging from the ceiling, one column for each county in the United States where a Black man, sometimes many Black men, had been lynched as a way to terrorize and control blacks, particularly in the South under Jim Crow.
Outside this building, organized shoulder to shoulder by states were the same size columns lying on the ground. Buncombe County, my county, had four names and the dates when they were murdered. These columns were waiting for those counties to come and promise to put the column up in a public place as a reminder of this horror from the American past and as a warning to ourselves of the what we have done in the past, similar to the ways in which Germans insist of facing their own past.
Buncombe County has removed the Vance Memorial, a monument to a racist Civil War governor of North Carolina who grew up in Buncombe County and who after the war actively suppressed Blacks. On Pack Square where the giant obelisk was there is an empty pedestal surrounded by a metal fence. And while Asheville is deciding what to replace the Vance Memorial with there is a column, reminding us of the effect of Vance’s racism, waiting for us in Montgomery to bring to Asheville and erect.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 