What are the brass stones in Berlin's sidewalks?

They are Stolpersteine, "stumbling stones": small brass plates set into the pavement, each one hand-made and each one for a single person persecuted by the Nazis. A stone is placed in front of the person's last freely chosen home, not where they died. Berlin has more than 11,000, and the project, started by artist Gunter Demnig, counts more than 126,000 stones in 31 countries as of May 2026, which makes it the world's largest decentralized memorial.

What does the writing on a Stolperstein mean?

Almost every stone follows the same formula. HIER WOHNTE means "here lived". Then comes the name, then JG. with the year of birth (short for Jahrgang). The last lines give the fate: DEPORTIERT with a date and destination such as Riga or Auschwitz, ERMORDET meaning murdered, or FLUCHT IN DEN TOD, the project's chosen words for a person who took their own life under persecution. GEB. before a second surname is the birth name of a married woman.

Is it disrespectful to step on Stolpersteine?

No. The project's own position is that walking over the stones is fine; the artist compares them to the grave slabs in cathedral floors that centuries of feet have polished. Footsteps actually keep the brass bright. What reads as disrespectful is standing on a stone for a posed photo or blocking a doorway for a long photo session while residents are trying to get in.

Where do I find Stolpersteine in Berlin?

In front of ordinary front doors, which is the point. Mitte has about 2,200 stones, including one at the entrance to the Hackesche Höfe at Rosenthaler Straße 40/41. Berlin's first stones from 1996 are in Oranienstraße in Kreuzberg, and the Bayerisches Viertel in Schöneberg has nearly a thousand. You can search any name or street on the official database at stolpersteine-berlin.de, and the free Stolpersteine Berlin app shows the stones around you on a map.

Can I sponsor a new stone?

Yes, anyone can. A stone costs EUR 120, or EUR 132 if you order from outside Germany, which covers the hand-made plate, the installation and the database entry. The real work is the research: the person's full name, birth date, the stations of their persecution and their last freely chosen address. Applications in Berlin go through district initiatives, and in busy districts such as Mitte, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf and Tempelhof-Schöneberg the wait runs up to four years.

Why do the stones look shiny in some streets and dark in others?

Brass darkens unless it is walked on or polished. Busy pavements keep stones bright on their own; quiet streets depend on neighbors. Every 9 November, the anniversary of the 1938 pogrom night, Berliners polish the stones in their streets, often leaving candles and white roses. If you want to help, the official method is ordinary metal polish on a cloth, then water; never use a wire brush.

Stolpersteine in Berlin: How to Read the Brass Stones Under Your Feet

Yusuf Ucuz
3 days ago
7 min read

Updated: 1 day ago

There is a moment on almost every tour I give. We are standing at the entrance to the Hackesche Höfe, people are looking up at the Art Nouveau facades, and I ask them to look down instead. Set into the pavement at Rosenthaler Straße 40/41 are small brass squares with names on them. Most of the group has already walked over brass squares like these a dozen times that day without seeing a single one.

They are called Stolpersteine, stumbling stones, and once you notice them Berlin never quite looks the same. My advice: spend ten minutes learning to read them. The text on every stone follows the same compact formula, so if you can read one, you can read all eleven thousand in this city.

Four brass Stolpersteine for the Salinger family set into dark cobblestones in a Berlin pavement

Four stones, one family. Georg, Rosa, Ursula and Gerd Salinger were deported in 1942 and 1943. Rows like this mark whole households.

What the brass stones in Berlin's pavement actually are

A Stolperstein is a hand-made brass plate, 96 millimetres square, mounted on a concrete cube and set flush into the pavement. Each one commemorates a single person persecuted by the Nazis, and it is placed in front of the building where that person last chose to live. Not where they were arrested, not where they died: their last freely chosen home. That one rule is why the stones are scattered through ordinary residential streets instead of gathered at the famous memorials.

The project was started by the artist Gunter Demnig, who set a first commemorative stone in Cologne in the early 1990s and has been laying them across Europe ever since. As of May 2026 there are more than 126,000 stones in 31 countries, which makes this the largest decentralized memorial in the world. Berlin alone has more than 11,000, spread across 76 of the city's 97 localities. Demnig is 78 now and still lays many of the stones himself.

What a stone actually is: a full concrete cube with the brass plate on top, photographed minutes before it went into a pavement in Weißensee.

The stones are not stamped out by a machine. Each letter is hammered into the brass by hand in a small workshop, deliberately, because the maker believes a machine would turn the names back into anonymous units. That is also why new stones appear slowly: the workshop manages roughly 450 to 600 stones a month for all of Europe.

The people commemorated are not only Berlin's murdered Jewish residents. Stones also mark Sinti and Roma, political resisters, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexual men and women, people murdered in the so-called euthanasia programme, and forced labourers. The formula on the brass is the same for all of them.

How to read a Stolperstein

Stand over a stone and the text can feel like a wall of German capital letters. It is not. It is a fixed formula with three parts, top to bottom.

HIER WOHNTE means "here lived". Nearly every stone opens with it. Variants exist for schools and workplaces, such as HIER LERNTE (here studied) and HIER ARBEITETE (here worked).
The name, then JG. and a year. JG. is short for Jahrgang, the year of birth. If you see GEB. before a second surname, that is a married woman's birth name.
The fate lines. DEPORTIERT with a date and a place name such as Riga, Theresienstadt or Auschwitz. ERMORDET means murdered. And FLUCHT IN DEN TOD, literally "flight into death", is the project's chosen wording for a person driven to take their own life under persecution. The language is deliberately plain. The stones say murdered, not perished.

Close-up of the Stolperstein for Ida Jaffe in Schöneberg with the full inscription sharply readable in warm light

Ida Jaffe's stone in Schöneberg. VERHAFTET means arrested, ABGESCHOBEN deported. Every line follows the shared formula.

The reader below walks you through three real Berlin stones line by line: the very first stone laid in this city, the stone at the entrance to the Hackesche Höfe, and a stone in Moabit that carries the harder vocabulary. Tap the lines the way your eye meets them on the street.

Is it disrespectful to step on them?

This is the question I am asked most often on tour, usually by someone hopping awkwardly around a stone. The answer from the project itself is no. Demnig compares the stones to the grave slabs set into cathedral floors, walked over and polished by centuries of feet. Footsteps are what keep the brass bright; a stone nobody walks past goes dark.

What does read badly is posing on top of a stone for a photo, or camping in a doorway for a long photo session while the people who live there are trying to get in with their shopping. Photograph the stones by all means. Just remember the door behind you is somebody's home, which is precisely the point of the whole project.

One more thing worth knowing: not every German city wanted them. Munich still does not allow Stolpersteine on public ground, after the head of its Jewish community argued that names in the pavement can be trampled and dirtied. Berlin took the opposite view, and the argument between those two positions is part of what the stones mean today.

Where to find Stolpersteine in Berlin

The honest answer is: in front of ordinary front doors, everywhere. But some places are worth naming.

Rosenthaler Straße 40/41, Mitte. The entrance to the Hackesche Höfe, where my tour ends. Among the stones here is one for Anita Bukofzer, deported to Auschwitz with her family in January 1943, a few weeks before her thirteenth birthday. Thousands of people walk over her name every day on the way to the courtyards.
Rosenthaler Straße 39, next door. The alley holds Otto Weidt's Workshop for the Blind, the free museum in the actual workshop where Weidt employed and hid blind and deaf Jewish workers. Stones outside commemorate the workers who were murdered.
Große Hamburger Straße, Mitte. Dense with stones, and also home to The Missing House, a separate memorial that mounts residents' names on the firewalls of a bombed gap. Nearby is the Koppenplatz memorial of a table with an overturned chair. These are different projects that share a neighbourhood; not every plaque you see is a Stolperstein.
Oranienstraße, Kreuzberg. Where Berlin's story with the stones began. Demnig laid the first 51 in May and June 1996 without permission, during an art exhibition. The city legalized them afterwards. Thirty years later there are more than 780 stones in Kreuzberg alone.
Bayerisches Viertel, Schöneberg. Nearly a thousand stones, the densest concentration in one neighbourhood, in the streets I wrote about in the Schöneberg guide. The lamppost signs quoting anti-Jewish decrees there are again a separate memorial, deliberately woven through the same streets.

A long row of eleven Stolpersteine set into a Berlin mosaic sidewalk, seen from standing height

Eleven stones in one stretch of pavement, seen exactly as a passer-by sees them. Every one of these is a former resident of the buildings behind.

If a name or an address stays with you, you can look it up. The Koordinierungsstelle runs a full searchable database and map of Berlin's stones with a researched biography behind almost every name, and a free Stolpersteine Berlin app for iOS and Android that shows the stones around wherever you are standing. This is also how I checked the stories in this article.

Mitte, where most visitors spend their first day, has about 2,200 stones. If you are walking my route from Alexanderplatz to Hackescher Markt, you will pass them without trying; the ~2h walk is also, quietly, a walk across dozens of front doors with names in them.

Who keeps the brass shining

Brass darkens unless it is walked on or polished. In busy streets, foot traffic does the work. In quiet streets, neighbours do.

A group of Berlin neighbours kneeling on the pavement polishing a cluster of Stolpersteine with sponges and metal polish

A polishing group at work in Halensee. Metal polish on a cloth, water, a sponge. Never a wire brush.

Every year on 9 November, the anniversary of the 1938 pogrom night, Berliners come out and polish the stones in their streets, often leaving candles and white roses beside them. If you happen to be in Berlin on that date, it is one of the most quietly moving things you can witness in this city, and nobody will mind if you kneel down and help. The official method is ordinary metal polish on a cloth, then water. Nothing abrasive.

A single red rose laid beside the polished Stolperstein for Else Liebermann von Wahlendorf in Berlin

A rose beside the stone of Else Liebermann von Wahlendorf on Budapester Straße. Flowers appear on the stones all year, most of all on 9 November.

New stones are still being laid, and this is the part most visitors never hear: anyone can propose one. A stone costs 120 euros, or 132 from outside Germany, and the sponsor's real contribution is research: the person's full name, birth date, the stations of persecution, the last freely chosen address. In central districts such as Mitte the waiting list runs up to four years. The pace is slow because the workshop is slow, and the workshop is slow on purpose.

Gunter Demnig kneeling on a Berlin pavement setting a new Stolperstein while onlookers hold a rose

Gunter Demnig laying the stone for the mathematician Robert Remak in Lichterfelde. He still sets many of the stones personally.

A heavily weathered, dark Stolperstein for Oskar Levy on Oranienstraße in Kreuzberg

A darkened stone on Oranienstraße in Kreuzberg, the street where Berlin's first stones were laid in 1996. Quiet corners depend on neighbours with polish.

The project's founding idea is a line Demnig borrows from the Talmud: a person is only forgotten when their name is forgotten. That is what you are doing when you stop and read one. It takes thirty seconds, it costs nothing, and it is the exact opposite of walking past.

If this side of Berlin matters to you, plan an hour for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Topography of Terror as well; the stones are the personal counterpart to those big documentary sites, and together they make more sense than either does alone.

Image credits

The Salinger family photo is by Dietmar Rabich (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0). The new stone on its cube is by Sebastian Wallroth (Commons, CC BY 4.0). The row of eleven stones is by Thomas Quine (Commons, CC BY 2.0). The polishing group is by Fridolin freudenfett (Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0). The Demnig photo and the rose photo are by Axel Mauruszat (Commons, CC BY 2.0 DE, and Commons, attribution license). The weathered stone is by OTFW, Berlin (Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0).