Sabbath Devotional :: Stumbling Blocks to Stepping Stones

There are stories beneath our feet. Some are marvelous. Some are horrifying. Many are a mix of both. Here is what happens when we learn to unearth and examine them all.

Walking the tree-lined streets of Bad Homburg, a suburb north of Frankfurt where my family and I have lived for many years, I sense daily the reverberations of stories beneath my feet. This happens in part by way of “Stolpersteine” (literally “stumbling stones”), the brass-covered, engraved blocks of cement cut the same size as surrounding cobblestones in between which these special markers are placed. Their location is significant: They point to the last residence of former locals who were slain in the Holocaust.

Going to the dentist, my steps freeze before the stone for Dr. Bernhard Wiesenthal, deported, as the engraving states, in 1942 and murdered in Sobibor. Picking up vegetables at the open market, I lower the kickstand of my bike near the edge of brass plaques for Eduard Rothschild and his family, deported in 1942 and murdered in Mauthausen. Walking the dog to the city park, I pass the doorway from where, in 1942, Franzsiska Idstein was deported to and murdered in Treblinka. And on my way home I spot the muted sheen of two side-by-side stones: Robert and Frieda Altstuhl, both murdered 1942, also in Treblinka.

Since German artist Gunter Demnig lay his first Stolpersteine in a small Austrian town in 1992, 50,000 such tokens have been placed across Germany and in 17 other European countries, making it the world’s largest decentralized memorial. Most are specifically for Jewish victims of the Holocaust, but others are for people the Nazi regime judged dispensable or dangerous: Black people, gay people, people with mental or physical disabilities, and Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Freemasons, members of the anti-Nazi resistance including the Christian opposition, military deserters and conscientious objectors, Allied soldiers and other enemies of the state.

Strikingly to me, Stolpertsteine only made their appearance in Bad Homburg after much public debate and resistance, in 2016. That happened during our family’s years here. Which means I live shoulder to shoulder with people who both fought for and fought against publicly commemorating this facet of German history. My own neighbors might number among those who resent public recognition of Bernhard, Eduard, Franzsiska, Robert, and Frieda, whose brutally truncated life stories are central to this country’s darkest chapter and, therefore, part of its national identity.

So, I’m left to ask myself: Why would otherwise docile, decent people oppose acknowledging all of their country’s history, both its marvelous as well as its horrifying episodes? Who would dispute the value of remembering these lost lives and the cautionary tale their tragic end gives us about what one philosopher calls the “vast machine of administrative mass murder in whose service not only thousands of persons, nor even scores of thousands of selected murderers, but a whole people could be and was employed”? [1]

What is it in our nature that resists inconvenient truths — the kind that challenge our preciously held paradigms: My country is all good; my political party is all good; my ancestors were all good; I am, therefore, all good. Why do we often bend ourselves into pretzels pretending our inherited identity (in this case, German national identity; but this can apply to any group identity we might espouse) is unambiguous, full only of heroism and altruism? Why do we sometimes prefer sanitized, romanticized versions of the past over straight, unvarnished facts? And, most important, what can Christ’s gospel teach us about listening closely to and learning from all stories, both the marvelous and the horrifying?

Christ offers us an injunction in D&C 88:118 to seek “out of the best books words of wisdom” and to “seek learning, even by study and also by faith.” This counsel suggests we can and should learn from stories — the best stories. The catch, however, is that not all “best” stories are immediately sweet to the taste or easy to digest. Some are bitter, even sickening, and might chafe against treasured beliefs and challenge personal biases. Some might, for instance, put our country, political party, faith community, even our own ancestors or other heroes in a dim light or rattle the pedestal we’ve placed them atop.

That said, it has been my experience that it is in the excavation of the layers of our collective past and in making sense of the complexity of our history — personal and national — that we can put into practice what James Baldwin famously noted: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” History is the imperfect ground upon which we can and must perfect our future.

I suppose the few “anti-Stolpersteiners” here in Bad Homburg feel their position was justified. Some might be Holocaust deniers or anti-Semites. But I’ll guess the majority have more benign motivations, like, “It’s all behind us now. Why be reminded?” Or, “It’s time to be proud of being German. Why the shaming?” Or, “My grandfather was a Nazi, and my uncle was an SS officer, and both were honorable family men, true patriots. Is it evil to do one’s duty?” Or, “That wasn’t me. Why should I be held responsible?” Or, “It was atrocious and I’m sure I never would have supported it. So I don’t want to be made to feel guilty.” [2]

That last rationale is another reason why the Savior urges us to learn from the “best” stories. Complex narratives have paradoxes — the kind we encounter in reality and unearth while studying the Holocaust or the history of slavery and massacre of native populations in what is now the U.S. These paradoxes should unsettle us as well as coax us to imagine ourselves within others’ lives, both heroic and villainous.

In good stories, those categories are not always crisply demarcated. Characters who are otherwise honorable, patriotic folk can be so tragically flawed that they dutifully send their neighbors to death camps. Conversely, patently evil characters can do the sweetest things, like buy flowers for their aging mother or celebrate Easter with their children, all within the same sweep of igniting a gas chamber. Such stories effectively illustrate the complexity and messiness of the human condition, and therefore might leave us asking ourselves, not, “How on earth could they have done that?” but, “Lord … is it I?”

Part of learning from the dark as well as the light stories beneath our feet means that, beyond putting history under a microscope, we put ourselves under the microscope with history. Yes, whether we were actual actors in an atrocity or not, we ought to be ashamed of historical evils. But our responsibility to history cannot end there. Neither people nor entire peoples advance by being ashamed or shamed. We advance individually and collectively by recognizing, remembering, and even seeking reconciliation for our wrongs — by, to paraphrase George Santayana, remembering our past so we will not be condemned to repeat it.

A few final words: “When your children ask their fathers in times to come, ‘What do these stones mean?’ then you shall let your children know…” — Joshua 4: 21-24.

By teaching others, particularly the rising generation, what things like Stolpersteine mean, by carefully recounting the excruciating history such emblems signify, stones and people are changed. The stones become tokens over which, rather than mindlessly tripping, we bend, lower, and prostrate ourselves. The act of examining history from a posture of deep humility and even reverence can transform us.

In turn, that inward conversion transforms the stones. From stumbling blocks — nuisances, burdens, pockmarks on a society’s glossy veneer, ugly souvenirs of a distant someone else’s wrongs — they become stepping stones. They progress us toward stronger character and greater understanding. Indeed, they can even become a deterrent from future evil. In the words of Jewish-German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt, the stories beneath our feet can incite a communal covenant to resist our human inclination to repeat atrocities:

Upon them and only upon them, who are filled with a genuine fear of the inescapable guilt of the human race, can there be any reliance when it comes to fighting fearlessly, uncompromisingly, everywhere against the incalculable evil that men are capable of bringing about. [3]

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Melissa Dalton-Bradford is a founder of Mormon Women for Ethical Government.

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[1] Hannah Arendt, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility” in The Literary Trust of Hannah Arendt and Jerome Kohn, (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2019), 207-208.
[2] Robert R. Weyeneth, “The Power of Apology and the Process of Historical Reconciliation”, in University of South Carolina Scholar Commons, originally in The Public Historian, ed. Randolph Bergstrom, Volume 23, Issue 3, Summer 2001, 25-30.
[3] Hannah Arendt, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility” in The Literary Trust of Hannah Arendt and Jerome Kohn, (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2019), 212-213.