Street Names and Political Identity: The Case of East Berlin

Street names are convenient and popular political symbols, a fact not generally recognized. Street names reflect and manifest a certain political identity they are indicators of political identity while at the same time being part of it. They also help form a desired political consciousness among the population. It is not surprising, therefore, that major political changes are reflected in the renaming of streets, as instanced in Tehran in 1978 and Managua in 1979. The regime of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) in East Germany was not the first'in Germany to politicize street names, which, up till 1918, reflected the official political ideology of the Kaiserreich. The nazis, in turn, removed those street names denoting an undesirable democratic political tradition and replaced them with appropriate nazi names. Little attention has been paid to the relationship between street names and official political ideology in East Germany. Ralf Dahrendorf has pointed out the difference between street names in East and West Germany' and P.J. Lapp has investigated new street names in the city of Leipzig.2 This article will examine one set of East German street names as indicators of political identity and communicators of political propaganda, those of East Berlin, the capital of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It will consider the symbolic value of both the names which have disappeared and those which have replaced them. It will also study the political and ideological background against which some particularly notable renamings were made. In short, it will attempt to follow and analyse the political process which brought about changes in the names of hundreds of streets in East Berlin after 1945.