Berlin's Stolpersteine: how to read the brass stones under your feet

Walk any residential street in Berlin's older districts and you will cross them: squares of brass ten centimetres wide, set flush into the pavement outside a doorway, each with a few engraved lines. They are Stolpersteine, "stumbling stones", and there are thousands of them in the city.

What a stone says

The inscriptions follow a fixed form. "Hier wohnte" (here lived), then a name, a year of birth, and what happened: deported, the year, the place, and usually "ermordet" (murdered) with a date, or "Flucht" (fled) with a destination. Some say "Freitod", a death by suicide ahead of deportation. A stone may stand alone or in a group of a family, laid side by side.

The address is the point. A stone is placed outside the last home a person chose freely, before they were forced out, so that the memorial sits in daily life rather than in a museum. The word on the stone is often the only public record that the person lived there.

Who put them there

The project began with the artist Gunter Demnig, who laid the first stones in the 1990s and has since extended the practice across Europe with local groups who research the names and pay for each stone. Berlin has more than any other city. Stones are added every year, each one usually with a short ceremony and relatives present where any can be found.

They commemorate everyone persecuted by the Nazi regime: Jews first and in the greatest number, and also Sinti and Roma, political prisoners, homosexual men and women, people with disabilities who were murdered under the "euthanasia" programme, and others.

How to look at them

You are meant to stumble over them with your eyes, not your feet. Stop, read the name, read the year. The brass is polished by shoes and fades to brown where few people walk; some neighbourhoods clean their stones on the anniversary of the November 1938 pogrom. Bending down to read one is the whole gesture.

Districts with the most stones include Charlottenburg, Schöneberg, Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg and Kreuzberg, which is to say the streets where Berlin's Jewish middle class lived before 1933. The Bayerisches Viertel in Schöneberg, where Albert Einstein once lived, has both stones and a separate set of street signs quoting the laws that step by step removed Jewish residents from public life.

Why the app treats them differently

Berlin's map in Xploreo holds roughly ten thousand places, and a large share of them are memorial stones: more than six thousand. If they were ordinary stops, they would crowd out everything else on the map, pull every walking route towards whichever street had the most of them, and be read aloud by a narrator in a tone that belongs to a palace, not a name.

So they are their own layer. They appear when you zoom in to street level, grouped by address so a family's stones are one marker, with the inscription shown as text. They are never route stops and never ranked against monuments. The grade system that puts the Brandenburg Gate at the top does not apply to them; they sit outside it on purpose.

Where a memorial plaque has its own recorded story, the app keeps it as a stop. The stones do not. They are there to be noticed on the way to somewhere else, which is how they were meant to work.