Stolpersteine are not a stage: on the instrumentalisation of Shoah remembrance at the festival “48 Stunden Neukölln”From 3 to 5 July 2026, as part of the art festival “48 Stunden Neukölln”, the event “Walking The Gaza Monologues” will take place: an audio-guided walk by the Ashtar Theatre from Ramallah, in which the “Gaza Monologues” are staged along Stolpersteine in Neukölln – that is, along those memorial stones that commemorate Jewish neighbours who were torn from their homes by Germans, deported and murdered.
We say with all clarity: this is not art that probes boundaries. This is a calculated violation of boundaries. Anyone who deliberately performs texts about the Gaza war at Stolpersteine places the Shoah and Israel’s war against the terrorist organisation Hamas on one and the same line. This equation is historically false, it is perfidious – and, according to the working definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), to which the Federal Republic and the Land of Berlin are committed, it is antisemitic. The descendants of the victims are turned into perpetrators; Jews are turned into an indictment of the Jewish state. This is perpetrator-victim reversal in its purest form, played out on the backs of the dead.
Stolpersteine are this city’s decentralised memory. Every single stone stands for a human being, for a name, for an extinguished life. They belong to the murdered and their descendants – not to a theatre project that misuses them as a backdrop for a political message. Anyone who instrumentalises the memory of the victims of the Shoah in this way mocks them a second time.
We are aware that this event is not a criminal offence. But what is legal is by no means therefore legitimate. Artistic freedom protects against state prohibition – it obliges no one to provide such tastelessness with a stage, a festival and public funds. It is a damning indictment of Berlin’s cultural sector that Israel-related antisemitism has by now become so self-evident there that it is waved through as an item in the programme of an established, publicly funded festival.
We therefore demand:
Firstly: The organisers of “48 Stunden Neukölln” must cancel the walks immediately. Anyone who lets them take place makes the relativisation of the Shoah their own.
Secondly: The festival’s public funders – at district as well as at Land level – must examine whether and how taxpayers’ money flows into a programme that turns the remembrance of the victims of the Shoah against Jews of today. Public cultural funding is no licence for antisemitism in the guise of art.
Thirdly: We expect a clear, public dissociation from those with political responsibility in Neukölln and in the Land of Berlin. Silence here is not neutrality but consent.
Eighty years after the Shoah, memorial stones for murdered Jews are being made in Berlin into the stage for a narrative that declares Israel the perpetrator of a “new genocide”. Anyone who stays silent about this has learned nothing from the history these stones commemorate.
Elio Adler
Chairman
