Author, authorHistory books This article is more than 12 years oldThe naming of Berlin
This article is more than 12 years oldGermany's complicated history is written in the street names of its capital, but the past is refracted anew in every present, says James WoodIn his autobiography, Keith Richards tells us that Dartford council has renamed the streets near the house in which he grew up: now there's a housing estate with Sympathy Street, Dandelion Row and Ruby Tuesday Drive. Richards deserves it, and who could begrudge him his cocky, inevitable coda: "All that in a lifetime." After all, Sir Mick has an eponymous building in the same town, called the Mick Jagger Centre. Just as long as we don't get Honky-Tonk Drive, Bitch Boulevard or Satisfaction Street – more New Orleans's kind of thing than Kent's.
Dartford council's alacrity is unusual. In this country we are careless about naming streets after cultural figures. It's a little depressing how many of the most famous London squares and roads are named after dukes, earls and wealthy property-owners, and how comparatively few after writers, artists, composers and scientists. Jermyn, Dartmouth, Devonshire, Bedford, Fitzroy, Leicester, Langham, Harley, Tavistock, Portland, Trevor, Russell, Rutland are all remembered because we walk on their aristocratic names. At least Shepherd Market is named after its builder, Edward Shepherd, and not its owner. But George Eliot didn't get a London street named for her in her lifetime, nor after it, either. In our capital city, there is no Virginia Woolf Road, or Joseph Conrad Avenue, or Wittgenstein Square, or Auden Street – though Kirchstetten, the Austrian village where Auden spent his summers, has an Audenstrasse.
Berlin, where I live at present, both amuses and impresses me with its street-naming zeal. Daily, in this city, one moves through zones of German triumph and atonement. I'm round the corner from Fontanestrasse, named after one of Prussia's greatest novelists, Theodor Fontane; it is one of six streets memorialising the novelist in greater Berlin. A trip to the local supermarket takes me past Brahmsstrasse, Richard-Strauss-Strasse and Furtwänglerstrasse. The city is full of streets and squares named after Beethoven (five of them), Bach (four), Wagner, Schubert, Schönberg, Schiller, Lessing, Schopenhauer, Fichte, Hegel. First world war flying aces, such as Manfred von Richthofen, are remembered, and one gets the occasional shock from streets whose quite innocent names have been dusted by history: Colditzstrasse, Barbarossastrasse. But Berlin is anything but a nationalist city, and its cosmopolitanism is inscribed in the generosity of its street-naming: Smetana, Tagore, Mahler, Freud and Donizetti all receive street-notice. I could send my children to the Charles Dickens school, on Dickensweg (which translates as Dickens Way). The local erotic store, Erdbeermund ("strawberry-mouth") is named after a line from a François Villon poem. Were I feeling especially philosophical, I could take a book to a café on the corner of Leibnizstrasse and Kantstrasse, a place where it is, presumably, a categorical imperative to think that one is in the best of all possible worlds. And Berlin also uses street names as atonement for the crimes of history: hence Jesse-Owens-Allee, Hannah-Arendt-Strasse, Ben-Gurion-Strasse and a platz named after the great critic Walter Benjamin, who died in Spain fleeing from the Nazis (alas, it's a rather hideous area, less like a square than a concrete corridor).
Street naming has often been fraught in Berlin. The rapid exchange of different regimes in the 20th century has meant a constant inscription and erasure of history; here the past is sedimented, in shallow layers. Weimar republic names were sometimes replaced in the 1930s with National Socialist names, only to go through the process again after the war, when East Germany cleansed itself of fascist reminders, and was then recleansed after 1990, in an eager (often overeager) attempt to rid the memory of communist allegiances. The eastern city of Chemnitz, for instance, became Karl-Marx-Stadt after the war, and is now Chemnitz again. Stalinallee, in Berlin, quietly became Frankfurterallee in 1962.
The most celebrated example of this ideological shape-shifting in Berlin is Theodor-Heuss-Platz, which was Reichskanzlerplatz until 1933, when it became Adolf-Hitler-Platz. It reverted to its original name after the war, and got its newest name in the early 1960s. Or take the complicated rewritings of the U-Bahn station at Mohrenstrasse, which was originally called Kaiserhof at the beginning of the last century, after a big hotel nearby. Finding itself on the East German side after the war, the station was renamed Thälmannplatz in 1950, after the communist leader Ernst Thälmann (a man rightly honoured throughout East Germany, who endured 11 years of solitary confinement under the Nazis, and was shot in Buchenwald in 1944). Its name was changed again in 1986, to memorialise Otto Grotewohl, the former prime minister of the GDR, and only became Mohrenstrasse in 1991, after reunification.
And now there is pressure to change Mohrenstrasse once again, because of its racist and colonialist associations: "Mohr" means "Moor" in German, and the street name is thought to be derived from African musicians who played in the Prussian army. According to a report by David Crossland in the National, anti-racist groups have identified 10 tainted street names, and have already successfully persuaded the district of Kreuzberg to rename Gröben Bank, which was originally named after an early Prussian colonial adventurer. The prominent historian Götz Aly attacked the movement in a local newspaper, arguing that a city's street names document the errors, mindsets and false certainties of the various epochs they represent; that, he wrote, is why they are instructive ("lehrreich"). Of course, once could argue that nothing is more characteristic of Berlin than this kind of ideological force majeure; the very hubris of the anti-racist renamers is also "instructive". Ideally, Berlin's streets would list all their names, past and present, in a living and transparent palimpsest. Then one could seize their troubled histories instantly, rather like the furniture I recently came across in an American ambassador's residence: a table whose underside was stamped with a swastika and eagle (the house had been requisitioned in the war by Nazi officers), and next to it, a simple American barcode label, announcing its official appropriation by the United States government.
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