Formal place, communal identity and public memory are mutually constitutive, autonomous, characterising elements in the formation of a social community that are intrinsically linked in the public sphere. 1 Identity is connected to the historical events which that community chooses to remember and makes manifest in the urban fabric through sites of public memory. Memory, an incredibly strong and dynamic aspect of a social population, is also the most difficult aspect to define. Maurice Halbwachs articulates different types of memory: autobiographical, historical and collective. 2 Autobiographical memory is the memory of events we have experienced first-hand. The other two memory types relate more directly to the discussion of public memorials. For Halbwachs, history is the preserved past to which we no longer hold an ‘organic’ relationship. Historical memory, however, can be either organic or dead (reaching us only through historical records). History and historical memory tend to be imagined by the present population, rather than organically remembered. Collective memory is an active past that we can relate to and which defines our communal identities. 3 It is woven into the fabric of communities and evolves with them. French historian Pierre Nora distinguishes between lieux de mémoire , or sites of memory, and milieux de mémoire , real environments of memory. 4 Memorials and commemorative sites tend to be sites of memory – traditionally authorised by a governing body, and supporting a particular narrative intended for the community. As a result, memorials are often very political projects and as a consequence they can become a compromise between community factions. For Nora, democratisation and mass culture on a global scale has caused a fundamental collapse in memory. 5 However, contrary to his suggestion that there are no longer milieux de mémoire , there do exist memorial projects that cultivate real environments of memory. Stolpersteine , a project by German artist Gunter Demnig, functions as such throughout Germany and neighbouring countries and fosters a true memory community. Stolpersteine, or stumbling blocks, are stones laid in the public pavement to commemorate those who were deported and killed by the Nazi regime. Each stone names a single individual; a 4inch cube of concrete, plated in brass, is inscribed with the name, date of birth and ultimate fate of each person – the date and location of deportation and death. The stones are laid in the paving in front of that person’s last residence. Since the project began in 1993 there have been over 20,000 stones laid in over 500 locations – most in Germany, with a smaller number in Austria, Hungary and the Netherlands. These stones form a complex decentralised memorial, mapping a landscape of memory created by those victims of the Holocaust. As a result, the monument operates on multiple scales – first, at the smallest scale, each stone commemorates a single individual; at a larger scale, the collective memorial commemorates the larger body of victims and the enormous magnitude of the tragedy. In this way the stolpersteine take an original approach to one inherent challenge of public memorials; how does one preserve and convey the gravity and magnitude of such an event within a single site or object? This broadly recognised dilemma is perhaps most acute in memorials to the victims of the Nazi regime.
urbanism | memorials by aisling o ’ carroll
Stolpersteine a landscape of memory
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Aisling O’Carroll
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