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The art of not forgetting — from Stolpersteine and street names to racism and emails

The art of not forgetting — from Stolpersteine and street names to racism and emails
Marianne Merten
By Marianne Merten
27 Apr 2023
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History, when it’s more than the victor’s account, reflects and includes the extraordinary in the ordinary. It’s the commemoration of what everyday people did in adversity and struggle.

It pays to keep one’s eyes on the ground in Berlin. That’s where history is written on Stolpersteine, or bronze cobblestones bearing the names, dates of birth and the killing locations of Jewish residents deported by the Nazis.  

It’s indeed a rare Stolperstein — literally stumbling stone, the initiative of artist Gunter Demnig — that marks something different, like the one commemorating where Nathan Israel’s Kaufhaus, or department store, stood from 1815 until the Nazi takeover in 1939, or the one for Wilfrid Israel (1899-1948), “saviour of Jewish children”. 

Or the one commemorating the survival of Rosa Schlagk, who after living in hiding was deported on 11 August 1944 to Theresienstadt concentration camp, from where she was freed.

But sometimes it pays to look up. Berlin streets are often named after people, but not always after grand politicians, aristocrats, musicians or poets. And while Johann Wolfgang Goethe may not need an explanation, Bleibtreu Strasse does — and so it gets a little sign to say it’s named after the painter Georg Bleibtreu. That’s in what used to be West Berlin, where sometimes changing street and square names can take years, and where the Namibian anti-colonialist fighter Cornelius Fredericks is honoured, as are Cameroonian royals Rudolf and Emily Duala Manga Bell, who were hanged in 1914 for their resistance to German colonialism.

In what was East Berlin, the little sign above the street name often reflects resistance to fascists, or Nazis.

Like Olga-Benario-Prestes-Straße, named after the “seller and anti-fascist, born 12.02.1908, died spring 1942”. Or Anton-Saefkow-Straße, named after the executed unionist and Communist Party of Germany member for organising Berlin’s biggest Nazi resistance group before his arrest in July 1944, and execution. A park and a bust stand in his memory. 

The graffiti of Soviet soldiers who arrived in Berlin in 1945 is still visible and preserved on some walls in the Bundestag (German parliament). 

The contributions of ordinary people


The point? Ordinary people’s contributions to a city’s and a country’s history are recorded in detail and honoured. This was something South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended, but like the stalled reparations, has mostly remained unfulfilled.

And so the art of not forgetting is forgotten.

In the United Kingdom, such forgetting cost Labour MP Diane Abbott her political party membership. Labour suspended her in the widespread public outrage over her letter to the Observer newspaper that Irish, Traveller and Jewish people may experience prejudice, “but they are not all their lives subject to racism”.

Abbott, who in 1987 became Britain’s first black woman MP, stays on the parliamentary benches as an independent in the UK constituency electoral system. Calls have been made for her not to stand in the next election.

In South Africa, the deputy minister of correctional services, Nkosi Phathekile Holomisa, remains put, unapologetic, despite the Thabo Bester prison escape saga.

While not quite forgetting to check his email, he hadn’t checked it because this was assigned to an official, who had yet to report back, Holomisa said in late March. It emerged that a warder had emailed him in June 2022, saying Bester had escaped and the burnt body in Bester’s cell was not his, according to GroundUp, which raised questions as far back as November 2022.  

Amid the forgetting in this debacle, Police Minister Bheki Cele announced that the police had known of the escape of the rapist and murderer, but he didn’t announce it because he didn’t want to compromise the police investigation. 

In response to DA MP Glynnis Breytenbach’s question about what he would have said if another woman was murdered or another woman raped by Bester, Cele replied: “I am not a speculator.”

Perhaps fighting gender-based violence and femicide is forgotten until the next time President Cyril Ramaphosa delivers a speech on what he styles “the second pandemic”.

The point? Those with power have forgotten the art of not forgetting. And not forgetting the impact of ordinary people, not the generals or the politicians, on how history ultimately turns out.

After all, history is written not in books, but every day. As Washington Post editor Philip L Graham put it, “Journalism is the first rough draft of history.”

The memorials of not forgetting across Berlin, from the Stolpersteine to street signs and Soviet soldiers’ graffiti, to monuments like the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, acknowledge and pay tribute to ordinary people.

It’s the art of not forgetting. May South Africa not forget. DM

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