The major source of resentment in the East derived from the nature of unification itself, which involved the wholesale imposition of Western institutions, values, and practices on the former GDR. While many East Berliners, especially at the beginning, were willing enough to adopt—or to try to adopt—Western ways, a sense of victimization soon took hold. Easterners claimed that they were being “colonized” by a West that was determined to extinguish everything that the GDR had stood for.
One of the first tasks that victors often undertake after absorbing a conquered territory is to replace objectionable place names with designations reflecting the altered political circumstances. As we have seen, Berlin had experienced several waves of name-changing over the course of its modern history, the most extensive being that following the Nazi defeat in 1945. Reunification brought another spate of rechristening, particularly in the east, which was littered with streets and squares named after Communist leaders, leftist heroes, and Third World Marxist martyrs. The legal tool for the name-changing was the 1985 West Berlin Strassengesetz, which was amended and extended to the entire city. It called for “the removal of those street names from the period 1945 to 1989 [honoring] active opponents of democracy and also intellectual-political precursors and defenders of Stalinist tyranny, the GDR regime and other unjust Communist regimes.” Following these guidelines, authorities in united Berlin ordered seventy-five name changes in the eastern part of the city in the two years following German unification. Many of these changes were made by district councils and were not controversial. But as time went on, with more and more Communist heroes losing their places of honor on the municipal map, East Berliners with ties to the old system began to complain that the Wessis were trying to rob them of an important part of their collective identity.
The Berlin city council voted on May 16, 1991, to return Hermann-Matern-Strasse to its old designation of Luisenstrasse. This generated little resistance, for Matern had been the SED’s chief inquisitor and enforcer of ideological conformity. At the same meeting, Otto-Grotewohl-Strasse, the former Wilhelmstrasse, was renamed Toleranzstrasse. This decision, however, did not last long, for the French pointed out that there was a similarly named street in Paris’s red-light district, and it would not do to have the new capital’s major governmental street associated with prostitution (enough people would make that link anyway). With Toleranzstrasse out, the council opted for Willy-Brandt-Strasse, but this choice was overridden by the senator for Traffic and Public Works, a CDU-man. He insisted on a return to Wilhelmstrasse, and, in 1993, Wilhelmstrasse it became. Meanwhile, the CDU delegates on the city council proposed to rename all streets and squares honoring Karl Marx, August Bebel, Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and Clara Zetkin. The PDS and SPD balked at this, and the battle became so heated that the city authorities created an independent commission, which included noted historians, to advise them on these issues. The commission recommended that Communists who had died too soon to help bring Weimar down, or the GDR up, should not be purged, thus sparing Marx, Bebel, Luxemburg, and Liebknecht. Zetkin, however, remained fair game, since she had lived until 1933. Conservatives and moderate socialists on the commission pointed out that Zetkin, a dedicated Communist during the 1920s, had been an enemy of parliamentary democracy. Her street, which led from eastern Berlin to the Reichstag, occupied a very sensitive location. Thus in 1994 Clara-Zetkin-Strasse returned to its old name of Dorotheenstrasse, much to the dismay of local leftists, who held a protest rally decrying the “slander” of a great anti-Hitler activist and feminist crusader. Käthe Niederkirchner, a young Communist resistance fighter who had been murdered by the Nazis, was luckier. The street named after her in GDR days was not returned to its original designation—mainly because the previous name, Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, now was synonymous with the Gestapo. However, because the Berlin municipal parliament had taken over the former Prussian House of Deputies, which is located on this street, the small piece of the road directly in front of the parliament was renamed Platz vor dem Abgeordnetenhaus. This way the Berlin legislators would not have the name of a Communist on their letterhead.
Throughout these struggles over nomenclature, the left accused the conservatives of hypocrisy, noting that several streets in western Berlin still bore the names of prominent generals and militarists, such as Moltke, Roon, and Richthofen. But the left was fighting a losing battle. In 1994 the senator for Traffic and Public Works struck again, returning Dimitroffstrasse (named after Georgi Dimitroff, head of the Comintern) to its previous designation, Danziger Strasse. This not only angered local leftists, who celebrated Dimitroff as the hero of the Reichstag fire trial, but alarmed the Poles, who worried that some Germans might imagine that restoring a street name was the first step toward regaining “lost territory” in the east. In a similar leap backwards, Marx-Engels Platz was returned to its old designation of Schlossplatz. Justifying this action, conservatives argued that it was hardly fitting for the square that had once harbored the royal palace (and might do so again, if a group of restorationists had their way) to carry the names of noted haters of the monarchy.
Monuments, like street names, often become bones of bitter contention following a change in regime. East Berlin had its full share of physical testimonials to communist heroism—a motley collection of pillars, busts, statues, and shrines, most of them as aesthetically unappealing as the neighborhoods in which they stood. Some inspired little affection even among GDR patriots and could be removed by the new powers in Berlin without much controversy. Few protested, for example, when the authorities ordered the elimination of the monuments to GDR border guards who had died at the Berlin Wall. It was quite otherwise with the proposed dismantling in 1991 of a sixty-three-foot-tall granite statue of Lenin, which had been dedicated by Walter Ulbricht in 1970 on Lenin’s hundredth birthday. Claiming that it was totally unacceptable for Berlin to honor a “despot and murderer,” the Diepgen government insisted that the statue be removed. A group of East Berliners, many of them residents of the Leninplatz neighborhood in Prenzlauer Berg where the statue stood, rallied to the defense of the monument on grounds that it was an integral part of GDR history. As one of them said: “For me, it’s not about Lenin, but rather about demonstrating our power and not letting ourselves be pushed around.” The easterners held protest demonstrations and draped the statue with a huge sash saying, “No Violence!” The PDS, meanwhile, demanded that if Lenin went, so must the Victory Column in West Berlin, which was equally “political.” In the end, the Victory Column stayed and Lenin went—ignominiously broken up into pieces and deposited in a gravel pit. Leninplatz was then renamed Platz der Vereinten Nationen (United Nations Square), an ironic choice for a place that had now come to symbolize discord and division.
The fate of another GDR-commissioned monument, a huge bronze bust of the German Communist leader Ernst Thälmann, also became the focal point of an identity struggle in reunited Berlin. Unveiled by Honecker in 1986, the sculpture was a latter-day socialist equivalent of Wilhelm II’s Siegesallee, a triumph of bombastic kitsch. (In a modern touch, Thälmann’s nose was heated to prevent snow from accumulating there, but little could be done about the pigeons who left their signature on his bald head.) When the Berlin government proposed eliminating this monstrosity in 1993, a cry of protest went up from Ossis still smarting from their loss of Lenin. This time they managed to save their hero, largely because the bust was so big and solid that it would have cost too much to break down and cart away. The argument was also made that this work deserved preservation not as a political statement but as a classic example of GDR iconography—a historical relic of considerable value. Those who found the monument offensive could always smear it with graffiti, which, in fact, they did not hesitate to do. By the mid-1990s Thälmann looked less heroic than pathetic—a perfect symbol for the defunct regime that had claimed him as one of its secular saints.