The Controversy Over Renaming The Streets Of Berlin’s Afrikanisches Viertel Through The Lens Of Public History

This thesis scrutinizes a recent controversy over the street names in Berlin’s Afrikanisches Viertel.Almost all the streets in Afrikanisches Viertel,a traditional German middle-class neighborhood since the early 20 th century,were named initially after the ethnic groups or geographical landscapes of former colonies in Africa or German colonial pioneers.For decades,several NGOs and black communities in Berlin have been working on renaming three of the streets which bear the names of atrocious colonial rulers,arguing that the extant namescape of Afrikanisches Viertel used to serve as propaganda for German colonialism which indirectly results in the stigmatization and dehumanization of black people in the past and which,most importantly,continuously produces racism today in a rather subtle and unconscious way from which the people of color still suffer.Their blueprint is to rename the streets after African anti-colonial fighters and by doing so,to convert Afrikanisches Viertel into a public anti-colonialism memorial space.While earning considerable support in the local assembly,this initiative confronts strong resistance of local inhabitants who claim to refuse any outside interventions in their neighborhood.Drawing on J?rn Rüsen’s historical consciousness theory and the notions of space and place in human geography,I would suggest that behind this ongoing dispute there are,on the one hand,competing historical interpretations and narratives of German colonialism as well as,on the other hand,contested claims of rights to the urban public space.In the meantime,I would also sketch,tentatively though,the dialectical intersections between these two intrinsically interwoven dimensions: how people employ one to negotiate the other and vice versa.Finally,I would argue that merely what people have done and said for/against the renaming initiatives makes Afrikanisches Viertel a continuously becoming and unfolding memorial space in Deleuzian sense despite the future result of this issue,and this is also where we could delightfully recognize the resistant potentiality of public history.