Bavarian Quarter

Places of Remembrance – Competition Entry (1991) Exclusion and disenfranchisement, expulsion, deportation, and murder of Berlin Jews between 1933 and 1945

This work develops an artistic concept for decentralized remembrance within the urban space: Plaques embedded in the sidewalk mark the places where Jewish people lived before they were disenfranchised, deported, and murdered. The ground thus becomes a vehicle for memory – an everyday, incidental, and yet unavoidable part of public life.

The principle lies in making the disappearance visible: Passersby must lower their gaze, stumbling, as it were, with their eyes over a fragmented register of names inscribed in the city's texture. Remembrance is not monumental, but rather everyday, concrete, and locally situated.

The 1991 competition entry for the project "Places of Remembrance in the Bavarian Quarter," Berlin, thus anticipates what would become a defining European memorial a year later with Gunter Demnig's "Stolpersteine" (stumbling stones).