Between Grassroots Pressure and Local Polycracy: Street Renaming in Nazi Berlin

Abstract

The names of Berlin’s streets have attracted scrutiny throughout the twentieth century. When regimes collapsed and their pantheons of heroes fell into disrepute, some city streets named after individuals had to be changed: streets honouring republican luminaries no longer seemed appropriate during the Third Reich; militaristic street names seemed out of touch in Communist East Berlin; and reunited Berlin seemed the wrong place to honour the architects of the German Democratic Republic. Cultural geographers have spearheaded much of the research on renaming in twentieth-century Berlin, but their work has focused on the postwar era, when name changes were decreed by high-ranking politicians and bureaucrats. This article examines the byzantine process of street renaming in Nazi Berlin. Rather than realizing any grand plan of approved street names, Nazi-era renamings were shaped by bureaucratic polycracy, jockeying centres of power and ad hoc name changes. Case studies—including the renamings as Ludendorffstraße and Limastraße as well as thwarted renamings as Paula-Christopher-Ufer and Paul-Lincke-Straße—demonstrate the chaotic and unplanned nature of Nazi-era renamings. Ultimately, grassroots activism and individual requests from below determined the Nazi-era history of street renaming far more than any vetted and approved plan from above. This was not a well-orchestrated ‘street-sign revolution’, as happened during the postwar era.