The Deutsche Welle profiles a film a about a controversial artist:

Doerte Franke’s documentary, titled simply “Stolperstein,” or “Stumbling Stone,” first drew acclaim when it featured at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland in July.

The film takes viewers on a journey with Cologne-based artist, Gunter Demnig, the man behind the stumbling stones — miniature memorials to victims of Nazi persecution — that have become part of city streets in more than 300 locations in Germany alone.

The stumbling stones are topped with square brass plaques inscribed with the names and birth dates of people who were deported by the Nazis, as well as the date and location of their death, if known. The stones are embedded in the sidewalk outside the person’s former address so that passersby can literally stumble across these reminders of the terrible fate suffered by Jews, Roma, homosexuals and political dissidents under Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.

It is said 17,000 stones have been installed in the past eight years. That rate will take almost 3,000 years to honor just 6,000,000 victims. Berlin and Hamburg make up about 5,000 stones together, while Munich of course has tried to block the project. Why do they object? Could it be related to property value or just a matter of a conservative Munich being a stick-in-the-mud until public reaction is more clear?

Franke’s camera follows the artist at the small ceremonies when the privately-financed stones are laid. The production and embedding of a single stone costs 95 euros (about $120). Often, the victim’s family members are shown in the film. But the camera also captures the reactions of passersby, or shows the team of women in Hamburg who’ve taken it upon themselves to regularly clean and polish the brass stones.

I really like Hamburg; definitely one of the top cities in Europe.

Seventy years ago, on November 9th, 1938, was the Night of Broken Glass in Germany:

Flames leapt into the sky across Germany when the Nazis gave a foretaste of the Holocaust in the vicious pogrom against the Jewish community. By the time the rampage had ended, thousands of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues had been burned down or looted by thugs as police and fire brigades looked on.

[…]

More than 400 people were beaten to death, shot or driven to suicide, records show. More than 30,000 were rounded up and packed off to concentration camps.

A museum has apparently just opened to commemorate Germans who helped hide others from Nazi persecution. Meanwhile, a new generation of Nazi sympathizers in Germany has emerged:

Figures disclosed by the government on Tuesday showed there were nearly 800 anti-Semitic crimes committed during the first nine months of this year, resulting in injuries to 27 people.

The British government, for comparison, reported over 300 anti-Semitic incidents in England during the first eight months of 2007.

Rob Brezsny has many funny things to say, and they are often enlightening as well. I like this bit:

Roshi’s wisdom reminded me of an anecdote told by Henry Kissinger, an American politician who was Secretary of State in the 1970s. Kissinger once asked Chinese premier Zhou Enlai what he thought of the French Revolution, which had happened two centuries earlier. “Too soon to tell,” Chou answered.

If only we could apply this logic in the SIEM or even incident market. I was just given a few weeks to investigate a serious incident…can it be done? Where is Inspector Poirot when you need him? Those TV detectives always seem to resolve things within one episode or two at the most.