berlin odonymy

the book that got my engine going on all this geography stuff is Von Wilhelmplatz zu Thälmannplatz: Politische Symbole im öffentlichen Leben der DDR ("From Wilhelmplatz to Thaelmannplatz: Political Symbols in Public Life in the GDR".)

(By the way: there are two used copies on amazon.de, but I can't order them unless I ship them to an address in Germany. If there's anyone in the amazon.de service area who's willing to receive this for me -- naturally, I'll pay you back for shipping -- I'd be happy to return the favor with American books.)

I read this for a paper I was writing while studying at the Humboldt University in Berlin in the mid-nineties. The project was on street renaming, some public political pyrotechnics that had been going on around me in Berlin ever since I landed there in '93.

Berlin, like other European capitols, had been absorbing outlying towns and villages as it grew outward. However, Berlin was a late bloomer and had started developing much later than centers like Paris or Prague, so the process of digestion and assimilation wasn't as far along, and even by the late 20th Century, Berlin's feel was still largely neighborhoody, with strong local character attaching to different city districts.

Then the cold war division put Berlin's commercial, political, and cultural center in the Eastern zone. The West responded by creating its own commercial and cultural centers. They ran a wall through Potsdamerplatz, which had been Europe's busiest intersection shortly before. Like a volcanic intrusion into ancient waterways, the Wall redirected the natural flow of Berlin's traffic. All of this resulted in what, in 1991, was a city with scattershot, fragmented weight-distribution.

Which means that Berliners lived all over the city: slept here, visited friends there, worked over there, shopped here and here and here. Everyone had, and used daily, a city map, the one most commonly used being the Falk Plan, a wonderfully detailed, ginormous map, cut and folded into five or six terraced pages contained in a little booklet. The Falk Plan includes all public transportation lines, bike lanes, landmarks and significant sites, etc. You can use it for practically anything. Actually, I think the Falk Plan, as much as anything, got me interested in maps and geography.

The Falk Plan's index was a little yellow-paged booklet attached to the front inside cover. Throughout the nineties, the first several pages of the index contained an alphabetical listing of Straßenumbenennungen, street renamings that had occurred since the reunification. It wasn't a just-in-case scenario; the renamings were so extensive that not finding a business street address in the Plan because the street had been renamed was almost a weekly occurrence.

Also frequent were taxicab discussions. I lived on Chodowieckistr., a small (two-block long) residential street, which had built and named around the turn of the century for an 18th century painter born in Danzig, who had his career in Berlin. Chodowieckistrasse's nearest major street was Danzigerstr., which had been, presumably, the road that led to Danzig, a major port city in Poland (a.k.a. Gdansk.) Access to Danzig, historically a touchy issue between Germany and Poland, had been one of the excuses for the Nazi march on Poland that touched off WWII. So, during the GDR era the contentiously named street was renamed Dimitroffstr. after Bulgarian communist leader and hardcore Stalinist Georgi Dimitrov.

Street renaming in the former East during the reunification was a touchy business distinguishing between general socialist icons (like Walther Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg) that both sides could get behind, and communist -- or Leninist/Stalinist -- icons that the West needed to repudiate ... like Dimitrov. So my taxi conversations would go like this: "I'm going to Chodowieckistr., that's at Greifswalder right near Danziger." "Danziger? Where's Danziger?" "It's the one that used to be Dimitroff." "Oh, did they change that one too?" "Actually, they changed it back, it was originally, Danziger." "Noooo! Can't be! It's been Dimitroff as long as I've been alive!"

Of course, the conversation above would have been between me and an East Berliner cabbie. Once I got into the habit of always saying "near Dimitroff", more and more West Berliner cabbies came on the scene and I'd have to do the convo in reverse. "Where's Dimitroff?" "Oh, they just renamed it to Danziger."

Lightbulbs started going on in my head around 1995 when I had a convo with a cabbie (a middle-aged former East German, brought up in a country whose raison d'etre was antifascism) who told me about an old lady famous among cab drivers, who had lived through the Nazi era in some capacity. She would get into a cab and demand to be taken to "Adolf-Hitlerplatz". Naturally, since this would have been one of the first places to be renamed after WWII, the cabbie would have no idea where this was, and all queries as to what it was called now would be in vain. "Adolf-Hitlerplatz" she would maintain. Eventually, he'd have to call it in, where the dispatcher, having dealt with her before, would be able to tell him that it was now Theodor-Heussplatz a surprisingly unimportant square out past the relevant part of central West Berlin.

I took a "European ethnology" class and signed up to do my paper on street renaming. Aside from a (out of date) pamphlet detailing the meanings of some street names, and a handbook on street renaming procedures and history (fascinating, but only for geeks like me), the main text I and my project partner used was Azaryahu's Von Wilhelmplatz zu Thälmannplatz.

In the book Azaryahu builds his theory around, not toponymy, but rather monumentalizing or memorializing people, places and events through toponyms, stamps and currency, monuments, and ship names. By not focusing on how places get named, but rather on how politically charged names get onto things, including places, he puts the weight of the inquiry on the meaning, and not the form. Seen through Azaryahu's filter, any map overlays two immediate topographies: that of the land or cityscape itself, and that of the meanings of the toponyms, which delineate a complex but readable system of political weight and importance.

According to the theory, the largest streets (and most prominently placed monuments, most used stamps and currency, and flagships) are named after the most iconographically important figures in the ruling political ideology of the time and place. (In practice, this can be counter-intuitive, and just outright confusing, since the city's history will render some names into metonyms: e.g. Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, in the central square in West Berlin, was built as a memorial to unified Germany's first emperor. But the name now signifies the devastation of total war since the church was left in its bomb-damaged condition as a memorial to WWII bombing raids.) Smaller streets tend to follow traditional conventions and be left in peace.

But then, when a constitutional change happens, when one type of government is switched out for another, it becomes crucial to replace the express and implicit network of political ideas and signifiers -- not merely to advertise the new regime, but to give opponents of the new regime no symbolic places to gather, or symbolic names and images to use as rallying points. The cityscape, its images and words, must reflect the new ideology even more stringently -- in its way -- than newspapers or textbooks, or polticians' soundbites. (Think about the effect wandering through the old part of town had on Winston in 1984. Think about how much strength he drew from prints of old views of churches and buildings that proved that things had once been different.)

Then the formerly unimportant or traditional smaller street names are found to have unsavory connotations, and these must be changed. Also, a new regime or ideology must firm up its hold on the popular imagination by doing more. So the rounds of renaming get bigger each time.

This sort of thing happens in tiny ways all the time in the United States and Canada, and other "free, democratic" countries, where the overriding political ideology has remained essentially stable for a century or two. These smaller street renamings are tiny corrections or additions to the national mythos , not the sort of wholesale revamping that has happened six times in the last 150 years of Berlin. We of stable constitutional makeup are provincials, babes in the woods, when it comes to understanding and utilizing the every day tools of political inculcation. We use street names for birds, flowering shrubs, the developers' family members' names. We just have no idea.

Comments

[GC]

extremely interesting ... growing up in new york city, though a 'young' city by european standards, i often was amazed at how and why parkways, streets, stations, and whole neighborhoods flowed though identity as if adrift on the ocean. more often then not i found that there were benevolent, sinister, or more shockingly - ignorant forces at work. if one does not see scars on the body, how do you know that the past was real? well, thanks ... there is food for thought in your post.

[claire]

gc: we like to think, per orwell and 1984, that erasing the past is a sinister and totalitarian thing, but all political entities, all human groups, do it. and they do it blithely, ignorantly, and necessarily. actually preserving historical buildings, sites and ways is a very recent phenomenon. i think the people who built those historical buildings, sites and ways would be mostly appalled, or amused, to see us preserving them at the expense of modern conveniences.