The Missing House & the Stumbling Stones
Why is it significant?
Look at the gap in the row of houses: a patch of empty ground between two bare firewalls, where a building should be and is not. High up on those walls hang small white plaques, scattered at different heights, as if someone had pinned notes to the sky.
Key Facts
| Place | The Missing House & the Stumbling Stones |
|---|---|
| Address | Große Hamburger Straße 15-16, 10115 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.52510, 13.39850 |
| Part of Walk | Golden Dome, Missing House: Jewish Berlin & the Scheunenviertel |
| Generated | Generated |
Look at the gap in the row of houses: a patch of empty ground between two bare firewalls, where a building should be and is not. High up on those walls hang small white plaques, scattered at different heights, as if someone had pinned notes to the sky.
This is The Missing House, a work by the French artist Christian Boltanski, created in 1990, just as Germany was being reunified. The house that stood here was destroyed by a bomb in the last months of the war. Boltanski and a group of students searched the archives for everyone who had lived in it, and set their names, their jobs and the years they lived here on the walls of the neighbouring houses, each plaque roughly at the height of the floor where that person once had a home.
The quiet genius of it is that Boltanski did not sort them. Jewish tenants who were deported are named alongside non-Jewish neighbours who died in the air raid or simply moved away. Names, professions, years, nothing more. One house, one staircase, one list. It turns an abstract number back into what it always was: a building full of neighbours who knew each other's footsteps.
Now look down at the pavement and you will start to notice small brass squares set among the cobbles. These are Stolpersteine, stumbling stones, created by the artist Gunter Demnig. Each one is laid outside the last freely chosen home of a victim of the Nazis, and engraved with a name, a year of birth, and a fate: deported, murdered, fled. Demnig began in the 1990s; today there are more than a hundred thousand across Europe, and many thousands in Berlin alone. To read one, you have to bow your head.
Some Berliners come out on the ninth of November, the anniversary of the pogrom night, to polish the brass until it shines again. Keep walking north along Große Hamburger Straße to the little green square at its top end, Koppenplatz, and look for a table with an overturned chair.