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Stumbling over History: Stolpersteine and the Performance of Memory in Spain's Streets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2020

ALÍCIA HERNÀNDEZ-GRANDE
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Abstract

The Stolpersteine (‘stumbling stones’) memorial project commemorates victims of Nazi violence and the Holocaust through an individual marker installed outside the last willing residence before deportation and execution. The Stolpersteine project has spread throughout Europe, providing an urban topography of sites where traumatic events occurred. Because Stolpersteine are placed in public streets, they create performance possibilities, inviting passing pedestrians to engage in past history and trauma. As the project grows throughout Europe, however, the universality of the stones abuts with the specificity of local history and memory. This article considers the Stolpersteine installed in the Catalan city of Manresa. These stones, representing twenty-eight Spanish Republicans who were interned at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, are framed by a Catalan-language audio guide that directly points to the collaboration of the Francisco Franco dictatorship with Nazi Germany. In so doing, the stones in Spain also stand for violence meted out during the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 4 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2020

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Footnotes

Thank you to my colleague and collaborator Elena Weber, with whom I have explored the world of the Stolpersteine in Cologne and Germany, and to Dr Lauren Beck and Eleanor Russell, who graciously shared resources on the audio tours. This article benefited immensely from the wise advice from Dr Noe Montez, Dr Lisa Jackson-Schebetta and Dr James F. Wilson as part of the Mid-America Theatre Conference Articles-in-Progress workshop; the keen eye of Dr Jessica Hinds-Bond; and encouragement from Clay Cogswell. Feedback from my editor, Dr Fintan Walsh, and from my two anonymous reviewers immeasurably improved this work.

References

Notes

2 Almost all Spanish Republicans interred in Nazi concentration camps were men. This is due to the fact that Spanish Republicans mostly were sent to the camps due to their involvement in the French Army or the French Resistance. A small number of Spanish women were interned at Nazi concentration camps, notably Neus Català i Pallejà from Els Guiamets, Catalonia.

3 There are some notable exceptions to this practice, including the Stolpersteine for Anne Frank and her family, which are located outside the attic where they hid.

4 Stolpersteine – Remembrance Stones Press Release, 6 December 2018, at www.stolpersteine.eu/fileadmin/pdfs/RemembranceStones_Statement_Mallorca_2018.pdf, accessed 2 February 2019.

5 Harjes, Kristen, ‘Stumbling Stones: Holocaust Memorials, National Identity, and Democratic Inclusion in Berlin’, German Politics & Society, 23, 1 (2005), pp. 138–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 144.

6 Demnig quoted in Lindinger, Gabriele and Schmid, Karlheinz, Grössenwahn: Kunstprojekte für Europa (Regensburg: Lindinger + Schmid, 1993), p. 61Google Scholar, translation by Elena Weber.

7 As of this writing (May 2019), Manresa is the only Spanish city that has an official audio guide that covers all of its Stolpersteine, though some other audio guides do exist: Geleen, Valkenburg, Dordrecht and Eindhoven in the Netherlands; Stralsung, Burghaun and Hagen in Germany. Meanwhile, media artist Juergen Czwienk has supplemented some of the Stolpersteine of Stuttgart with Eco-Boxes, audio recordings that play recordings of letters, official documents and other sounds related to the individual commemorated.

8 Hanauer, David, ‘The Discursive Construction of the Stolpersteine Memorial Project’, in Seymour, David and Mercedes, Camino, eds., The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century: Contesting/Contested Memories (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 263–76Google Scholar.

9 Taylor, Diana, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 143CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 In fact, concern over pedestrians forgetting about the stones or stepping on them has led to certain cities refusing their installation, most notably Munich.

11 Lindinger and Schmid, Grössenwahn, p. 61, translation by Elena Weber.

12 Available at https://izi.travel/en/d5bf-manresans-deportats-als-camps-de-concentraci%C3%B3-nazi/ca.

13 Gould, Mary Rachel and Silverman, Rachel E., ‘Stumbling upon History: Collective Memory and the Urban Landscape’, GeoJournal, 78, 5 (2013), pp. 791–801Google Scholar, here p. 793.

14 Harjes, ‘Stumbling Stones’, p. 145.

15 Smith, Jeffrey K. and Tinio, Pablo P. L., ‘Audibly Engaged: Talking the Walk’, in Tallon, Loïc and Walker, Kevin, eds., Digital Technologies and the Museum Experience (New York: AltaMira Press, 2008), pp. 63–78Google Scholar, here p. 65.

16 Samis, Peter, ‘The Exploded Museum’, in Tallon, Loïc and Walker, Kevin, eds., Digital Technologies and the Museum Experience (New York: AltaMira Press, 2008), pp. 3–8Google Scholar, here p. 5.

17 Geismar, Haidy, Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age (London: UCL Press, 2018), p. xvCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Institut Puis Font and Institut Lluís de Peguera. L'Associació de Memòria i Història de Manresa (a local historical association), and Amical de Mauthausen (a foundation that works to bring awareness of the Spanish victims of Nazi violence). It is not uncommon for the Stolpersteine project to work alongside schools and youth groups as a way to encourage young people to invest in their local history and memory preservation. Gemma Simon, Skype interview with the author, digital recording, 11 January 2019.

19 Mauthausen Memorial/KZ-Gedenkstätte, ‘Murdering the Sick’, at www.mauthausen-memorial.org/en/History/The-Mauthausen-Concentration-Camp-19381945/Murdering-the-Sick, accessed 11 September 2019.

20 Patrizia Violi, ‘Trauma Site Museums and Politics of Memory: Tuol Sleng, Villa Grimaldi, and the Bologna Ustica Museum’, Theory, Culture, & Society, 29, 1 (January 2012), pp. 36–75, here p. 37, emphasis in original.

21 Ibid., p. 39.

22 Roig, Montserrat, Els Catalans als camps Nazis, 4th edn (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1977), pp. 92–102Google Scholar.

23 David Pike, Spaniards in the Holocaust: Mauthausen, Horror on the Danube (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. xii–xiii.

24 Spanish Republicans faced dire conditions within Mauthausen, especially from 1941 to 1943. However, as more disadvantaged populations began arriving in greater numbers at Mauthausen after 1943, particularly Soviet prisoners of war and Jewish victims, the Spanish Republicans’ lot improved. They were more likely to be chosen for higher positions, including as assistants within the records and photography laboratory, and hence received better treatment and less treacherous conditions. In fact, ‘the Spanish role in the inner offices of Mauthausen is one of the primary reasons so much documentation from the camp survived the Nazis’ general purge of records and photographs in the days before liberation’. Brenneis, Sara J., Spaniards in Mauthausen: Representations of a Nazi Concentration Camp, 1940–2015 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), pp. 15–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Roig, Els Catalans als camps Nazis, pp. 552–3.

26 Ibid, p. 26.

27 Violi, ‘Trauma Site Museums and Politics of Memory’, p. 39.

28 Ibid., p. 43.

29 An early chapter of Roig's Els Catalans als camps Nazis details the horrific conditions at Argelers, from illness and lack of sanitation to the lack of food and bitter cold. Ultimately, joining the Compagnie de travailleur étrangers was a means for male refugees to escape the hunger, illness and misery (p. 58).

30 Ajuntament de Manresa, Manresans deportats als camps de concentració nazi, Izi.TRAVEL: the storytelling platform, at https://izi.travel/es/d5bf-manresans-deportats-als-camps-de-concentraci%C3%B3-nazi/ca, accessed 12 September 2019.

31 Ibid.

32 This is only a small part of a long-term and volatile cultural dispute between Castilian Spain and Catalonia where, as Montserrat Guibernau explains, ‘memories of oppression under Franco are connected with a long list of grievances’. See Guibernau, Montserrat, Catalan Nationalism: Francoism, Transition, and Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Solís, Fernando León, Negotiating Spain and Catalonia: Competing Narratives of National Identity (Barcelona: Intellect Books, 2003)Google Scholar; and Dowling, Andrew, Catalonia since the Spanish Civil War: Reconstructing the Nation (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

33 Harjes, ‘Stumbling Stones’, p. 148.

34 Naomi Westland, ‘Why Spain Must Investigate Franco-Era Crimes’, Press Release Me, Let Me Go (blog), Amnesty International UK, 18 June 2013, at www.amnesty.org.uk/blogs/press-release-me-let-me-go/why-spain-must-investigate-franco-era-crimes, accessed 2 February 2019.

35 Stainton, Leslie, Lorca: A Dream of a Life (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999), pp. 443–7Google Scholar.

36 de Mata, Ignacio Fernández, ‘The Rupture of the World and the Conflicts of Memory’, in Jerez-Farran, Carlos and Amago, Samuel, eds., Unearthing Franco's Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2010), pp. 297–303Google Scholar, here pp. 291–2.

37 Hanauer, ‘The Discursive Construction of the Stolpersteine Memorial Project’, p. 271.

38 Of the seven graves, Memorial Democràtic marks two of these graves as having an unknown number of bodies. They mark the other five as having an uncertain number of bodies, meaning that while there is a known range of victims, a confirmed number within this range is unknown. ‘Mapa de fosses de la guerra civil i la repressió a Catalunya’, Memorial Democràtic, Generalitat de Catalunya, at http://fossesirepressio.gencat.cat/ca, accessed 14 January 2019.

39 Ibid.

40 Arnau Cònsul, ‘Obrir Fosses per Tancar Ferides’, Sàpiens (Barcelona), January 2019, unpaginated addendum.

41 Gemma Simon, Skype interview with the author, digital recording, 11 January 2019. For more discussion of local and financial pressures on exhumations see also Ferrándiz, Francisco, ‘Exhuming the Defeated: Civil War Mass Graves in 21st-Century Spain’, American Ethnologist, 40, 1 (2013), pp. 38–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ferrándiz, , ‘Unburials, Generals, and Phantom Militarism: Engaging with the Spanish Civil War Legacy’, Current Anthropology, 60, 19 (2019), pp. 62–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Aragüete-Toribio, Zahira, Producing History in Spanish Civil War Exhumations (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Juliá, Santos, ‘Echar al olvido: memoria y amnistía en la transición’, Claves de Razón Práctica, 129 (2003), pp. 14–25Google Scholar.

43 Ferrandíz, ‘Unburials, Generals, and Phantom Militarism’, p. 66.

44 The Spanish political transition from dictatorship to democracy was a multi-year process that depended upon buy-in from the Spanish military and members of the Franco regime. The transition hinged upon an amnesty law, tacitly to protect anti-Franco activists, but which in practicality kept Franco-era laws, judicial decisions, land seizing, executions, jailings and more as legally recognized by the new Spanish Constitution. Crucially, this amnesty law protected the individuals within the Franco regime from prosecution. For more on the impact of this transition on Spanish society and politics see Aguilar, Paloma, Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002)Google Scholar; Ferrándiz, ‘Exhuming the Defeated’; Ferrándiz, ‘Unburials, Generals, and Phantom Militarism’; Guibernau, Catalan Nationalism; Macho, Antonio Miguez, The Genocidal Genealogy of Francoism: Violence, Memory, and Impunity (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2016)Google Scholar; Ramon, Joan Resina, ed., Disremembering Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000)Google Scholar.

45 Brenneis, Spaniards in Mauthausen, pp. 29–30.

46 Natalia Junquera, ‘El Gobierno prepara la salida de Franco del Valle de los Caídos’, El País, Madrid, 17 June 2018, at https://elpais.com/politica/2018/06/16/actualidad/1529162410_486351.html, accessed 12 September 2019.

47 Marta Simó, Serveis Educatius Memorial Democràtic, Skype interview with the author, 16 April 2019.

48 Particularly notable was the political fallout from the Spanish delegation to Mauthausen honouring the anniversary of the camp's liberation on 5 May 2019. The Catalan representative's speech compared the detention of Catalan politicians involved in the 2017 independence referendum to the internment of Spanish and Catalan prisoners at Mauthausen, to overwhelming condemnation from right-wing political parties and the Mauthausen Memorial itself. See Ana Carbajosa, ‘La Generalitat usa un acto en el campo de Mauthausen para hacer reivindicaciones políticas’, El País, 5 May 2019, at https://elpais.com/politica/2019/05/05/actualidad/1557047661_315113.html, accessed 10 September 2019; ‘El Govern reivindica la libertad de expression en actos como el de Mauthausen’, La Vanguardia, 5 May 2019, at www.lavanguardia.com/politica/20190505/462048356977/el-govern-reivindica-la-libertad-de-expresion-en-actos-como-el-de-mauthausen.html, accessed 10 September 2019.

49 Stolpersteine – Remembrance Stones Press Release.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid.

52 Blatt, Marty, ‘Holocaust Memory and Germany’, Public Historian, 34, 4 (2012), pp. 53–66Google Scholar, here pp. 62–3.

53 Hanauer, ‘The Discursive Construction of the Stolpersteine Memorial Project’, p. 274.

54 Cited in Blatt, ‘Holocaust Memory and Germany’, p. 21.

55 Gemma Simon, Skype interview with the author, digital recording, 11 January 2019.

56 Macho, The Genocidal Genealogy of Francoism, p. 3.

57 Gould and Silverman, ‘Stumbling upon History’, p. 793.