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Abstract
Conceptualising heritage as a contested process of past-based meaning production in the present, this paper analyses the ongoing dispute over street names in Berlin’s Afrikanisches Viertel. In 1899, Berlin named two of its newly-built streets Togo Street and Cameroon Street. Togo and Cameroon had been proclaimed the first German colonies in 1884. By 1958, 22 Berlin streets had been named after African regions that had been colonised by the German Empire or after German colonial protagonists. In 2004, several NGOs called for the renaming of some of these streets, igniting a fierce dispute over the heritage status of the German colonial past. Drawing on guided interviews and document analyses, we analyse this debate on three levels, showing how the NGOs and their claims have been marginalised on each level. While the level of agency can be traced back to the different positioning of the actors in the political field, the levels of temporality and spatiality belong to the realm of ideas about the world and one’s place in it. By exploring the authoritative power of traditional notions of permanence, and of place and space, this paper seeks to bring temporality and spatiality into the focus of those studying heritage-making practices.
Notes
1. The German Empire was a federal constitutional monarchy ruled by the German emperor (1871–1918).
2. In accordance with this, we spoke with deputies of the CDU (Christlich Demokratische Union – Christian Democratic Union) and SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands – Social Democratic Party of Germany) coalition parties, which currently rule Berlin’s Mitte borough in which the Afrikanisches Viertel is located; with a member of Berlin Postkolonial, an association which takes a critical view of colonialism; and with a representative of the local historical association. We also spoke with two people from the African community: one activist who is currently involved in a project for commemorating the colonial past in the Afrikanisches Viertel, and one associate of an African cultural association. Moreover, we analysed the website of the citizens’ initiative known as Pro Afrikanisches Viertel.
3. For some exceptions see Engler (Citation2013) and Kopp and Krohn (Citation2013).
4. In the same year, several initiatives from the African community called for the renaming of Mohrenstrasse in the centre of Berlin, which contains the term Mohr, a discriminatory German expression for black people. However, Mohrenstrasse, a very populous street, has kept its name to this day. In contrast, the largely untenanted street Groebenufer in Berlin’s Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg borough, named after Otto Friedrich von der Gröben, the founder of the first colonial outpost in Africa belonging to Brandenburg (a former electorate and now a German federal state that surrounds Berlin), was renamed after May Ayim, a poet, educator and activist in the Afro-German movement. This renaming was initiated in 2007 by the Bündnis 90/Die Grünen political party (The Greens) that has ruled the borough of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg since 2006. The petition was successful, whereas the renaming of Mohrenstrasse, located in the Mitte borough, failed because of a lack of majority in the respective local parliament, which was dominated by SPD and CDU delegates.
5. http://www.berlin-postkolonial.de/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=44verein&catid=24:verein, accessed December 29, 2015.
6. The dossier was published by the Street Initiative in which the following NGOs participated: ADEFRA, AfricAvenir International, Afrika-Rat Berlin-Brandenburg, Berliner Entwicklungspolitischer Ratschlag, Berlin Postkolonial, Global Afrikan Congress, Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland, Internationale Liga für Menschenrechte, Projekt ‘Unterm Teppich?’, Tanzania-Network.de, UWATAB and Werkstatt der Kulturen.
7. Adolf Lüderitz (1834–1886) established the colony of Deutsch-Südwestafrika in 1884. A conflict arose when the Germans calculated the land in geographical (7.4 km) instead of English miles (1.6 km). Lüderitz was therefore accused of the fraudulent acquisition of land belonging to the Aman, a subgroup of the Nama people (Kopp and Krohn Citation2013, 225).
8. http://www.pro-afrikanisches-viertel.de/, accessed December 29, 2015.
9. The term ‘African community’ was used in various ways by our interviewees. In this paper we will employ the term to refer to all people based in Germany who hold citizenship in an African state or who are German citizens of African descent, meaning that either they or at least one parent or grandparent were born in Africa (i.e. they have an African Migrationshintergrund [migration background]).
10. http://www.pro-afrikanisches-viertel.de/index.php/argumente, accessed May 5, 2015.
11. In March 2016 the deputy chamber of the Mitte borough surprisingly passed a resolution to initiate a participatory process on developing proposals for renaming Nachtigalplatz, Petersallee and Lüderitzstraße in favour of female African protagonists of the anticolonial movement. The decision was passed with the votes of the opposition parties and of the SPD delegates who thereby made the street names in the Afrikanisches Viertel a topic of their election campaign for the upcoming municipal elections. Since the deputy chamber however decided to commence the participatory process in November 2016 only, its implementation will strongly depend on the results of the elections that will take place in September 2016.
12. This expression (long term) was coined by Fernand Braudel, a member of the French Annales school of historical writing, in 1958. The Annales’ members opposed the dominant paradigm of a detached ‘event history’ and called for researching historical structures and their long trajectory instead.