LATIMES.COM S SUNDAY, AUGUST 25, 2019A19
OP-ED
T
here is an importanceto re-
membering.
That is why my father, at 94, re-
turned to Berlin in July after he
was forced to flee his homeland 80
years ago. He and his family were about to be-
come part of a unique artistic commemora-
tion.
Since 1996, the artist Gunter Demnig has
laid some 70,000 small brass-plated cubes,
known as Stolpersteine, or stumbling blocks,
around Europe in front of the last-known res-
idences or workplaces of those who were driv-
en out or murdered by the Nazis. They are
simply inscribed with “Here lived” and the
names, birth year, the year the person fled or
was deported, and where they went.
It has been called the world’s largest de-
centralized memorial.
My father, Tom Tugend, who remains an
active journalist and lives in Los Angeles, did
not seek to participate in the Stolpersteine
movement. A German public health re-
searcher, Benjamin Kuntz — who had re-
cently published a book on my grandfather’s
pioneering work in infant and children’s
healthcare — asked if he could request the
Stolpersteine be placed in front of the home
my father left behind.
My father and I had both been to Berlin,
but not together. And I had never heard him
speak his native language except for an occa-
sional phrase. But as Demnig silently dug up
existing bricks in front of 104 Reichstrasse,
my father spoke in fluent German about his
parents and his memory of Berlin life as a boy.
Those who gathered on the sidewalk —
about 100 in all — had varied connections to
us, or none at all. A pediatrician shared how
her father, also a doctor, admired the work of
my grandfather, a pediatrician named Gus-
tav Tugendreich, so much that he hung a
photo of him in his office. Distant relatives my
father had met just once years ago traveled
from France for the occasion. The taxi driver
who had driven us the day before showed up
with his wife.
Current residents of the apartment build-
ing spoke of how grateful they were to know of
the family that had lived there so long ago
and eagerly invited us in to my father’s old
apartment, now remodeled beyond recogni-
tion. But the small balcony was still there, the
one my father had stood on as he watchedHitler ride by.
After the crowd dispersed, four small
squares — all engraved with Tugendreich,
the German last name my father shortened
when he joined the U.S. Army and became a
citizen — lay shining in the sidewalk, sur-
rounded by flowers and a candle.
There is a potency to names. That’s why
we put them on tombstones. Why almost
3,000 are recited each year at the services for
the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. In the
speech I gave at the event honoring my fam-
ily, I mentioned the friends of my grandmoth-
er, all German refugees I knew during my
childhood. Saying their names aloud seemed
important. They were not forgotten.
The Stolpersteine project has influenced
efforts in the United States to name and me-
morialize some of the millions who were en-
slaved and brutalized because of the color of
their skin.In Montgomery, Ala., the Legacy Museum
and the National Memorial for Peace and
Justice opened last year. It is the first memo-
rial to address the lynching of thousands of
African Americans — some 4,400 names are
etched on worn steel columns.
The organization’s Community Remem-
brance Project works to place historical
markers and monuments in spaces known to
be lynching sites. Bryan Stevenson, the hu-
man rights lawyer who founded the Equal
Justice Initiative — the nonprofit behind the
Legacy Museum — told CNN he was inspired
by the Stolpersteine. Americans “have devel-
oped an advanced coping strategy of silence,”
he said, on the violence and wrongdoing in-
flicted for generations on black people.
After people visit the museum, the hope is
that they will say “never again,” Stevenson
said. That is the rallying cry of Jews about the
Holocaust, but Americans “have never beenrequired to say that” about racial injustice, he
said.
An American artist, Paul Growald, mod-
eled his Stopping Stones on the Stolper-
steine. His memorials are also small square
brass markers that he makes and inscribes
with the names of enslaved people and their
occupations. They are placed in the area
where slaves were forced to work. Nearly 30
markers have been laid in four Northern
states. They are also called Witness Stones.
In Germany, my father and I took a day
trip to the Jewish boarding school he at-
tended near Potsdam in the mid-1930s; his
dormitory was housed in Albert Einstein’s
summer home after the legendary physicist
had left the country. Outside the school is a
Stolpersteine in remembrance of Gertrud
Feiertag, the founder of the school. She was
killed in Auschwitz.
While there, we met Susan Neiman, direc-
tor of the Einstein Forum (which is the car-
etaker of the house) and a moral philosopher
who was born in the U.S. and lives in Berlin.
She is the author of “Learning from the Ger-
mans: Race and the Memory of Evil,” set to be
published this month.
Neiman said she expected the book to be
controversial for suggesting the United
States should publicly remember and come
to terms with historical wrongdoing in the
way the Germans have.
I know that Germany is seeing its own rise
in anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic attitudes
and incidents. But what my father and I wit-
nessed made us acutely aware of how far be-
hind the U.S. is in recognizing and acknowl-
edging our country’s history — especially
now, when we are so entangled in a painful
national conversation about Civil War statu-
tes, reparations and the continuing impact of
the institution of slavery in modern times.
The Stolpersteine are an especially com-
pelling type of memorial — unobtrusive, but
scattered everywhere, so even those who
don’t seek them out are forced to stumble
across them.
An American version could address our
country’s own shameful history. Not to create
guilt or to punish, but to do what our family’s
Stolpersteine ceremony did — to honor, to ac-
knowledge, to name. And then to move for-
ward.Alina Tugendis a New York-based
journalist.EACH BRASS CUBEhonors a member of the Tugendreich family, driven out of Berlin in the late 1930s and now part of “the world’s largest decentralized memorial.”Photographs byHans-Dieter RutschBBuuiillddiinngg aa mmeemmoorriiaall,,
oonnee bblloocckk aatt aa ttiimmee
My father fled Nazi Germany.
His homeland remembers him with
a marker inscribed ‘Here lived.’
By Alina TugendIN BERLIN,Tom Tugend touches brass-plated cubes held by artist Gunter
Demnig before he installs them in front of Tugend’s last home in Germany.I
n 2020, nearly aquarter of a
million young Californians —
myself included — will be inel-
igible to participate in the
state’s primary election, de-
spite being eligible to participate in
the general election just a few
months later. What gives?
A 2017 law moved California’s
primary up from June to March.
This more than doubled the num-
ber of people who will simulta-
neously be old enough to vote in
November but not old enough to
vote in the corresponding primary.
According to Census Bureau
data, approximately 200,000 Cali-
fornians were born between March
3 and Nov. 3, 2002. That includes
the majority of my high school
graduating class of 2020, and it
places a record number of soon-to-
be 18-year-olds in an electoral gray
zone. Despite our nominal right to
participate in the 2020 presidential
election, the inaccessibility of Cali-
fornia’s primary locks us out of a
key component in the decision-
making process.
Without a voice in the primary,
our only real choice in November
2020 will be whether to rubber-stamp one of the nominees pre-se-
lected by citizens whose interest in
the outcome of the election is likely
no greater than our own.
Lost to many of us will be the op-
portunity to meaningfully weigh in
on an especially crowded Demo-
cratic field. There are nuances to
the intraparty contest between Joe
Biden and Kamala Harris, Eliza-
beth Warren and Andrew Yang or
Cory Booker and Pete Buttigieg
that will disappear before the
apparently inevitable “Donald
Trump vs. a Democrat” general
election matchup.
Judging those nuances makes
primary votes powerful, and as U.S.
citizens who will be adults for the
duration of the next presidential
term, we ought to have a say in who
the nominees are.
The importance of Californians
having a say in the nominating con-
test has not been lost on state law-
makers. In late 2017, then-Gov.
Jerry Brown signed the Prime
Time Primary Act, pulling the
statewide primary up to March for
both presidential and nonpresi-
dential election years.
The change strengthens Cali-
fornia’s collective voice in the selec-
tion of presidential nominees, butit effectively doubles the number of
eligible general election voters who
will not be able to participate in
California’s primary — those turn-
ing 18 between the elections in
March and November.
It’s a great move for the state
and a good way to disillusion young
voters.
There is a solution that could
help future 17-year-olds in this
quandary: California should allow
them to vote in presidential prima-
ries if they will be 18 by the date of
the corresponding general elec-
tion. Twenty states with leadership
across the ideological spectrum al-
ready allow this practice, including
Mississippi, Kentucky, Maryland,
Illinois, Delaware and Connecticut.
This change could be enacted
without modifying any laws by peti-
tioning the California Democratic
Party and Republican Party to
modify their charters — as their
counterparts in five other states
have done. But California’s “jun-
gle” primary, in which all candi-
dates from all parties run against
one another, would make this a
complicated endeavor: If only one
party enacted the change, it would
be giving itself a potentially unfair
advantage.A better solution, Assembly
Constitutional Amendment 4, was
introduced in January in the state
Legislature. It would amend the
California Constitution and give 17-
year-olds going on 18 the same en-
franchisement they already enjoy
in nearly half the states. If ap-
proved by lawmakers, the pro-
posed amendment would take the
form of a legislatively referred ini-
tiative. California voters could be
asked as soon as 2020 to decide the
issue.
This is a personal issue for me as
a 17-year-old who will be a week too
young to participate in California’s
March primary, but nearly eight
months older than the youngest
voters in the November election. I
preregistered to vote the day I
turned 16 and always have a stack
of voter registration forms with me
at school to help classmates do the
same. It may be the naivete of
youth, but little is more exciting to
me than the fact that my genera-
tion will play a role in deciding the
outcome of the 2020 election.
Polls show that this kind of en-
thusiasm is common among young
voters, and studies suggest that, if
nurtured, this eagerness to partici-
pate can transfer into a lifetime ofcivic engagement. Research also
shows that voters who participate
in the first two elections for which
they are eligible are more likely to
become voters for life.
States that have implemented
amendments similar to the one be-
ing considered in California have
seen young-voter turnout and re-
tention skyrocket. Although it is
too late for the class of 2020 to bene-
fit from the proposed amendment,
if it is not addressed soon the issue
of gray-zone voters on the cusp of
adulthood will persist into 2022,
2024 and beyond.
For many, the most persuasive
argument in favor of this change
may be that other states have al-
ready made it. For me, the most
persuasive argument is the one I
see every day at school — my senior
class preparing to go out and en-
gage with the world. We’re planning
for our futures, figuring out what
we want the world to look like and
evaluating the available avenues
for success.
Sounds like we’d make excellent
voters.Ryan Beam, 17, is a senior at Scotts
Valley High School in Santa Cruz
County.18 by election day? You should get to vote in primary
By Ryan Beam