Stumbling upon history: Collective memory and the urban landscape

Notable historical events are most commonly commemorated by state-sanctioned monumental structures designed as collective memorials. In contrast, this essay attends to Gunter Demnig's Stumbling Stones, a countermemorial to the Holocaust, set in the vernacular landscape of cities throughout Europe. As participants in a trip sponsored by the German government, bringing American Jews to the capital city of Berlin, we reflect upon our experiences as we question the narrative differences between monumental memorials and countermemorials. This ethnographic study moves the reader through the crowded boulevards of Germany's capital city, past historical sites and into museums where we share space and commune with the voices of the past that have come to define individual and collective memory in Berlin.