Heinz Siering

It was the frustration and anger and helplessness and grief and desire to do something with young people and also show that we all belong together that led to the idea of building a lasting memorial in defiance of right-wing extremism. So I got the idea of portraying two people. A work colleague of ours back then drew the sketch. I imagined it as a man and woman, mother and father, breaking a swastika between them. Not a complete swastika, a broken one. And they would be kneeling in front of it and tearing it apart, with the female figure shown as pregnant. Saying, symbolically, “We bear the responsibility for our children’s future!” And around the memorial rings are welded, imprinted with the names of those who advocate for peaceful coexistence. In the middle are five rings for the women and children who were murdered. And they are surrounded by and embedded in the rings that encircle the monument and are covering it up bit by bit. At the inauguration there were 600 rings, now it’s 5,000, and I’ve been asked, “But what happens when the monument is covered by the rings and you can’t see it anymore?” I said, that is my dream, because I said we’d probably need at least 20 to 30 years before the rings cover the monument, and by then right-wing extremism won’t be an issue anymore and we’ll be a humanist democratic society where everyone lives peacefully alongside one another. It was a pipe dream, because since the monument was inaugurated there have been another hundred attacks against foreigners. I said to Frau Genç, who visited us and stood at the memorial with a Turkish group, “As long as the youth welfare workshop exists, we will take care of this place and we will never forget the arson attack.”