Activists build a mini-Holocaust memorial outside German far-right politician’s house

queeranarchism:

[Image of the mini Holocaust memorial and the house]

A group of activists on Wednesday unveiled a replica of Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial secretly erected outside the home of a far-right AfD politician who has urged Germany to ‘stop atoning for Nazi guilt’.

With 24 large concrete slabs set up in a garden next to Bjorn Hoecke’s house, the art collective “Centre for Political Beauty” said it wanted to send a daily reminder of the World War II horrors that led to deaths of six million Jews.

“We are doing our neighbourly duty,” the group’s leader Philipp Ruch told the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper. "We hope he enjoys the view every day when he looks out the window.“

The slabs are a smaller-sized replica of the famed Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, which consists of a solemn field of 2,700 grey blocks meant to evoke a cemetery.

Leading Alternative for Germany (AfD) member Hoecke provoked outrage in January when he labelled the tribute to the victims a “monument of shame in the heart of the capital” and urged Germans to focus less on their WWII guilt.

Ruch revealed that the protest group had secretly begun renting the property next door to Hoecke’s house in the bucolic central village of Bornhagen 10 months ago, in response to the controversial speech.

“He will now have to deal with the fact that he has neighbours who don’t consider the Holocaust Memorial a ‘monument of shame’, but who try to remember what had happened, to prevent it from happening again,” Ruch told the daily.

[Image of the large Holocaust memorial in the centre of Berlin. ]