“Stumbling blocks” by the artist Gunter Demnig now commemorate the victims of the Nazi dictatorship in more than 80 Bavarian towns and communities. In Rosenheim, this has only been debated for years, but now the city councilors are faced with a decision.
For a good week now, the CSU in Rosenheim’s city council has been impatient: the city should implement the resolution on personalized commemoration for the victims of National Socialism by June 30 of this year at the latest, according to a current application by the Christian Socialists. However, the commemorative resolution dates back to May 2015, and neither the CSU, as the dominant political force in the council, nor the two mayors they provided, Gabriele Bauer and Andreas March, were in a particularly hurry to implement it. However, in the fall, 16 city councilors from six different groups called for “Stolpersteine” by the artist Gunter Demnig to be laid in public areas in Rosenheim. And this motion is up for debate this Tuesday in the main committee and next week in the plenary session.
The outcome of the decision is as open as rarely in the city council
The outcome of this is as open as is rarely the case in the 44-strong Rosenheim Council. Because while the CSU rejects Demnig’s stumbling blocks for Rosenheim and the eleven Greens are completely in favor of it, opinions differ within the SPD or the Free Voters. Some city councilors see the stumbling blocks, of which Demnig and his helpers have laid around 90,000 copies in around 1,800 different municipalities in Germany and half of Europe, as a proven and appropriate way of commemorating. Others stick with the local CSU and also with the President of the Jewish community in Munich and Upper Bavaria, Charlotte Knobloch.
Knobloch also shaped the debate in Munich with her argument that the names of the victims were literally trampled on on such stumbling blocks laid in the ground. In the opinion of the local CSU, the city of Rosenheim should now do the same as the state capital has been commemorating individual victims of the Nazi dictatorship with metal steles for a number of years. Behind the stumbling blocks is also “a pronounced profit-oriented commercial interest of the artist,” the CSU said recently Upper Bavarian Volksblatt quote. At the same time, she complained about the “moral, political and social pressure” from the Stolperstein supporters on “those who think differently”.
Thomas Nowotny from the initiative “Culture of Remembrance – Stumbling Blocks for Rosenheim” rejects this as “absurd”. The initiative itself has established a variety of other forms of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism in Rosenheim, only the city has so far made no contribution to this. The first stumbling blocks were laid in neighboring municipalities such as Stephanskirchen and Kolbermoor in recent years at the instigation of the initiative. Since last summer there have also been seven stones in Rosenheim itself, but so far only on private property.