Hermine Nachmann

Hermine Nachmann is remembered in Stuttgart through a Stolperstein, a small memorial set into the pavement. Its brass surface brings a personal history into an ordinary urban setting. You encounter the stone at the last place a person freely chose to live, work, or study before Nazi persecution.

Gunter Demnig began the Stolpersteine project in 1992, creating a decentralized memorial across Europe. Each ten-centimetre concrete cube carries a handmade brass plate with a victim’s name and life dates. Jewish people, Sinti and Roma, Poles, homosexuals, disabled people, and Jehovah’s Witnesses are among those commemorated. More than one hundred thousand stones now form a network of remembrance across European streets. Unlike a central monument, this pavement memorial appears within daily life, where a passer-by may discover it unexpectedly. The brass plate keeps one person’s memory close to the place where ordinary life once unfolded.