The municipal council of Lindlar, a town in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, has voted to prohibit the laying of any further Stolpersteine in its public pavements. Stolpersteine are small brass-topped memorial stones set flush into the pavement outside the last freely chosen residences of victims of the Nazi regime, the fascist government that ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945. Stones already in the ground will remain. No new ones are permitted. The town confirms that the dead are honoured, and that the honouring will now take place elsewhere.

Each stone is a concrete cube ten centimetres square, capped with a brass plate and inscribed with the German words 'Hier wohnte' — 'Here lived' — followed by a name, a year of birth, a date of deportation and, where documented, a date of death. The cubes sit level with the walking surface, so that a pedestrian must lower the eyes, and sometimes stop, to read them. The project was begun in the 1990s by the German artist Gunter Demnig. More than 100,000 stones have been laid across Europe, a scale that makes it the world's largest decentralised memorial.

The council's stated objections are administrative. The stones, it holds, complicate street cleaning and winter maintenance, and constitute a tripping hazard. In place of stones distributed across the town, the municipality intends to establish a single central memorial at a designated site. Remembrance will continue. It will be concentrated, signposted and off the walking surface.

Councillor Ralf Steegmans, who chairs the committee responsible for streets and public order, told this desk that the vote concerned ordinary upkeep. 'Nobody in this town has anything against the victims,' he said. 'But a pavement is a working surface. The dead have the whole town at their disposal. The snowplough has one route.'

The decision has drawn a rebuke from the federal level. Germany's education minister has branded the ban a 'scandal'. Education is not the ministry responsible for pavements. The minister intervened regardless, indicating that the matter had outgrown its category.

Opinion among the locals divides along a line ten centimetres wide. Marlies Krämer, seventy-four, a retired schoolteacher whose family name appears on a stone already set into the Lindlar pavement, walks the route weekly. 'You learn a name when your shoe stops on it,' she said. 'From a bench, at a dedicated site, you learn only that a list once existed.'

The stones were named for the act of stumbling. The council has retained the name and removed the act. Eight decades after the regime that made the names necessary, the town has reached a settled position: the dead may return, in brass, to their own front doors, provided they inconvenience no one. Remembrance remains fully supported. It is simply no longer permitted to be in the way.