This is a more extensive version of an essay by Peter Brandt that appeared in Neue Gesellschaft/Frankfurter Hefte in March 2021. Brandt comments on identity politics here. Translated by Russell A. Berman, with comments here.
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In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States and the United Kingdom, growing numbers of statues of historical figures have been toppled, beheaded, or turned upside down. It has been a matter primarily of figures charged with participation in the extermination, oppression, and enslavement of non-white ethnic groups, such as the famous generals of the Confederacy during the American Civil War of 1861–65. The matter gets complicated because not a few of these targets of symbolic attacks or executions embody quite different qualities. Several of the American founding fathers, the first constitutional state, were slaveowners, for example, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and later third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, a figure of the Enlightenment and a wide-ranging intellectual. Although never a rigorous defender of slavery, he viewed blacks—in contrast to Native Americans—as inferior.
Enraged militants would have toppled the statue of Andrew Jackson, a former military hero, across from the White House, had it not been protected by security forces. There is no doubt that it was under Jackson that the expulsion of native communities east of the Mississippi was organized and carried out brutally, the initiation of large-scale genocide. Jackson’s presidency (1829–37) however also involved a persistent political democratization, although this only benefitted white Americans. Are these instances of progress, both for the United States and humanity, now obsolete because of the evident discrepancies in the thought and action, including clearly egregious misdeeds, of the participants? Of course not. Principles of constitutionalism, human and civil rights, as well as democracy would later turn into intellectual weapons in the fight against slavery and oppression.
Here in Germany it has so far been primarily a matter of changing street names. The Federal Government’s representative for questions of antisemitism, Felix Klein, has proposed renaming Pacelliallee (after Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII) in Berlin Dahlem in favor of the former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. With this suggestion, Klein follows the initiative of historians Julien Reitzenstein and Ralf Balke. Pius XII has in fact long been a controversial figure in light of his attitude toward fascism and national socialism, especially in the wake of Rolf Hochut’s 1963 play The Deputy. Catholic historians and theologians also have divergent evaluations of the pope.
Since 1917 or 1920, Pacelli was the nuncio of the Vatican in Germany, and he was, like the Catholic Church hierarchy at that point in time, politically and ideologically conservative and anti-liberal, as well as decidedly anti-communist. He rejected the Nazi Party and “folkish” tendencies, which were more widespread in Protestant contexts. As of 1930, he was the Cardinal Secretary of State and the most important foreign policy advisor of Pope Pius XI. There is also a consensus that in order to protect the autonomy of the Catholic Church and religious freedom for Catholics in Germany, Pacelli was always cautious in his comments on the Nazi dictatorship, before and after becoming pope in the spring of 1939, just as there is no doubt that the Vatican had knowledge of the persecution and execution of Jews, although not more than the allied governments: he had no certain knowledge of the death factories. In an indirect but clearly recognizable manner, Pius XII criticized the Nazi treatment of Jews, first at Christmas 1942, and at the end of October 1943 he initiated a large-scale rescue effort in cloisters and other church institutions to save Roman Jews in hiding.
This example too can demonstrate the ambivalence in the behavior of not a few historical personalities, depending on the perspective from which one views them. Of course, Eugenio Pacelli is not a role model for progressive democrats, including the Catholics among them, but that is not the issue. Where is the limit of the tolerable? One can find something problematic, from today’s point of view, even in the most admired figures like Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.
This holds, too, in light of the Palestine question, for a leading Israeli politician like Golda Meir, whose name has been proposed to replace Pacelli on the street in Berlin Dahlem. To avoid any misunderstanding: I am not at all advising against naming a street or a square in Berlin after Golda Meir. I am only rejecting the notion that no plausible objections are possible. By the way, it was Golda Meir who described Pius XII after his death in 1958 as “one of the most important benefactors of our Jewish people.”
Growing numbers of the important figures honored with monuments or street names are facing the suspicion of insufficient distance from national socialism and fascism or militarism, racism, and antisemitism. Familiar names with formerly nearly exclusively positive acceptance, like Martin Luther and Otto von Bismarck, are being called into question. In particular Luther’s hostility toward Jews and his polemic against the rebellious peasants have long elicited critical debates, as well Bismarck’s 1878 law against Social Democracy, his Kulturkampf against Catholics, his wars of unification between 1864 and 1871, and more. Yet until recently hardly anyone, across the whole political spectrum, would have argued that he was not an exceptionally capable “great” politician, a central figure of modern German history, despite ambivalent evaluations. Similarly no one would have denied Luther’s accomplishments as a reformer of Christianity, a liberator of the individual conscience, and a pioneer-inventor of our High German language. Catholics always accepted this too.
And if we are extending a critical review back into the early sixteenth century, why should we not also examine the various medieval and early modern princes? In light of our contemporary criteria, they are all scoundrels, if only because of the innumerable wars that they conducted. Yet well into the twentieth century, war was not condemned in principle, not even by republicans and socialists.
Consider the Margrave of Brandenburg Friederich II, called “the Iron” or “Irontooth,” who ruled from 1440 to 1470. There is a street in Berlin-Wilmersdorf between Hohenzollerndamm and Kurfürstendamm that commemorates him. His nickname recalls the hard hand he used against the estates dominated by aristocrats as well as against cities striving for autonomy, such as Berlin, where he waged a multiyear power struggle to construct his palace against the resistance of the urban residents.
Nor should we ignore the dynamic that could be initiated if right-wingers, liberal-conservatives, or others—as has already taken place in a few instances—started to try to change the names associated with historical figures they dislike, but whom the left values. During 1989–90 there were plenty of renamings in the former GDR, in part because certain people had been honored and respected, but plenty of Karl Marx Streets, and even Ernst Thälmann Streets, remained untouched. There has been a Karl Marx Street in Neukölln, i.e., in West Berlin, with this name since 1946. Last fall the monthly journal Jüdische Rundschau, a competitor to the Jüdische Allgemeine and edited by the Central Council of Jews in Germany, published an open letter to the Berlin Transportation Office calling for the renaming of the subway station at “Karl Marx Street” because of the “antisemitism” of the Jewish German Marx (“the worst racist, antisemite, and misanthropist of Germany”). It is true, Marx had no positive relationship to Jewish specificity, but “antisemitism” describes the issue as little as would the psychologizing expression of “Jewish self-hatred.” Shall we have to carry out these abstruse discussions in the future?
Let’s stay with examples in the capital city. The Green caucus in the Precinct Assembly in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg is trying to rename the streets associated with military figures, such as the “generals series” that begins in Charlottenburg with the Tauentzien Street and proceeds to Gneisenau Street in Kreuzberg, including the subway stations Wittenberg Square and Nollendorf Square, both named after battles of 1813. In this case, it appears to be viewed as irrelevant that these street names honor the leading officers of the anti-Napoleonic Wars of Liberation of 1813–14 and 1815, as well as (beyond Scharnhorst) the most important military reformer of Prussia, indeed one of the most decisive reformers after 1801. The naming took place in the 1860s, no doubt with the intent to integrate them into a military and antidemocratic tradition. But liberals and later Social Democrats resisted this integration, as did later the Socialist Unity Party [the Communist Party of East Germany] and East Germany, which regarded the era of Prussian reforms and the following Wars of Liberation as part of an emancipatory tradition.
An earlier decision of the Precinct Assembly in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg seems particularly curious: The Moses-Mendelsohn-Square, in front of the Jewish Museum, named after the Jewish Enlightenment philosopher of the eighteenth century, could not be kept because a principled decision of the precinct stipulated that 50 percent of all streets had to be named after women, and that until that quota was reached, women had to be given priority. But because they were afraid of eliminating the highly honored and widely recognized name of Moses Mendelsohn, the square is now called “Fromet and Moses Mendelsohn Square.” The wife was just added, which deserves more than one question mark, but at least they found a woman.
The renaming of the Beuth Institute for Technology involves the same circumstances. It was recently named in 2009 after the Prussian ministerial officer and reformer of technical education Peter Christian Beuth (1781–1853). This matter is less clear because it has not been firmly established whether Beuth delivered an exceptionally antisemitic speech in the Berlin Table Society, which was a group primarily of opponents and critics of the political and social reforms, but in which reformers and relatively progressive national patriots also participated; it had been founded in 1811, and the Prussian monarchy and its government under State Chancellor Hardenberg issued its Edict on Jewish Emancipation on March 12, 1812, which was far-reaching if not complete.
Based on the criterion of antisemitism or anti-Judaism, one could also reject the name of the great composer Richard Wagner, whose mid-nineteenth-century statements on this matter were prominent, but who also in May 1849 fought at the barricades in Dresden for the progressive constitution of the Paulskirche. What is the standing of reactionary and inhuman attitudes, especially expressed in public, in relation to the lifetime achievement of an individual?
The city of Düsseldorf made a widely noted decision establishing a historians’ commission under the leadership of the head of the Memorial Establishment and the head of the Municipal Archive, with the mandate to review all street names and make concrete recommendations (the final decision is reserved for the city council), in order to anticipate future proposals and controversies. Only names of individuals deceased after 1870 have been reviewed (with regard to the investigatory emphases on colonialism, militarism, national socialism, and antisemitism); a three-hundred-page report was issued in January 2020 with 79 special evaluations. In the end, only twelve names were proposed for renaming: for example, the street named after the composer Hans Pfitzner, who continued to profile his antisemitism even after 1945. Neither Richard Wagner nor other famous personalities are to be eliminated. Forty-two street names in “Category B” (of individuals who are partially implicated and require discussion) are to have explanatory texts added. In general, the report insists that the historical context has to be considered. The commission rejected any selective evaluation or an exclusive application of our contemporary moral assumptions.
Of course one can discuss the inclusion of particular individuals. For example, whether Field Marshall Erwin Rommel (thanks to a period of proximity to the anti-Hitler resistance), in Category B, is more worthy than Chief of General Staff Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, the author of the 1914 German attack plan for a rapid victory over France, in Category A, is not self-evident. This however makes clear how controversial the evaluation of the appropriateness of name-givers is, as soon as one gets beyond the major Nazi criminals and other potentates of murder, such as Stalin, whose name was erased in East Germany as of 1961.
Moor Street in the center of Berlin will carry the name of Anton Wilhelm Arno, the first African humanist at a Prussian university in the eighteenth century. There has been a campaign for years to change this street name because of the disrespectful and racist connotation of the word. Whether “moor” meaning “black” is really as pejoratively loaded as is claimed is not certain. (During the nineteenth century, “Moor” was for example Karl Marx’s nickname due to his dark complexion.) However language and especially conceptualizations were formerly more strongly stereotypical. Yet should the contemporary sensibility of those who feel affected become the decisive criterion, regardless of what they claim? There is barely a member of the “majority society” (which is described as “white” and declared to bear collective responsibility, although races are not supposed to even exist, even in the limited sense of large human groups that have been spatially localizable and characterized by certain external features—allegedly all a matter of “constructions,” like gender) who can accept that the name “moor” sounds so terrible to a group of citizens that one cannot even say it out loud as a proper name and instead should use “M*” in writing and in speech, as is already the case in official announcements.
The similarly rejected “N*-Word” (Negro) was not viewed as discriminatory until recently, in contrast to the pejorative other N-word from the American South. The German term derives from the Spanish negro, which just means black. Of course one should respect if this word, previously used in emancipated and engaged contexts, is no longer desired, but neither should one succumb to the illusion that colonialism and neocolonialism will be overcome by a language police.
Thanks to discourse-theoretical and linguistic research, we now know better than half a century ago that language shapes thinking, but linguistic hurdles of strict naming rules produce real communication barriers for normal people in the general population. Neither did most of them in the past necessarily express themselves in a politically correct manner. The complaint commonly heard today that one can no longer say anything is not only coming out of the ressentiment kitchens of right-wing extremists but also from the direct perceptions of unreflected “normies.” The Social Democratic workers of Berlin called the long-term second party chair, from 1890–1911, Paul Singer, a Jewish clothing manufacturer, “Jew Paul” (Judenpaule). That was meant affectionately. Nearly a million people showed up for Singer’s funeral on Feburary 5, 1911, the largest funeral march in the history of Berlin.
Similar to the former controversy around Moor Street, there is a discussion about Uncle Tom Street and the subway station “Uncle Tom’s Hut” in Berlin Zehlendorf, initiated on the basis of objections from some Afro-Berliners. In the United States, Uncle Tom is a figure in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sensational best-seller Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), but since the radicalization of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, he has come to be seen as the epitome of the submissive Black. Yet in the 1850s the sentimental and religiously inspired novel provided invaluable support to the abolitionists, the movement to end slavery in the American South (a movement that included many German emigrants). According to the metrics of today’s anti-racists, even the most emphatic democrats of the nineteenth century and the most dedicated socialists were “racists”, national supremacists, and, to use one more of the inflationary blind concepts (Reinhard Koselleck), fundamentally “inhuman”—one need only read, for example, Friedrich Engels’s rant in a letter to August Bebel of November 17, 1885, about “Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks, and other criminal rabble,” and this is hardly an exception. But there are very real problems. One speaks, pars pro toto, of the African quarter in Berlin Wedding. The street names there carry Germany’s colonial past from the 1880s to the military defeat in the First World War, which included an at times very bloody and even genocidal reality. This aspect of German history has receded in the consciousness of Germans, and to a certain degree of the inhabitants of the former colonies as well, because a British or French colonial rule followed with similarly inauspicious features.
For years, there has been an effort to eliminate at least the names of the worst representatives of German colonialism from the streets of the African quarter, above all Carl Peters (“Hangman Peters”), but also Adolf Lüderitz and Gustav Nachtigal, the latter known primarily as a naturalist. The Peters problem seemed to have been solved wrongly as early as 1986 with a rededication to a respectable local politician named Hans Peters because the street signs lacked forenames. This is hardly a convincing solution, if an even modest political pedagogical educational ambition was intended by the change. Residents and local businesses are skeptical or openly hostile for obvious practical and cost reasons, but also because of a habitual identification with the familiar, and the SPD cares more about “bringing the people along” than do campaign initiatives or the Greens. An initiative “Pro Africa Quarter”—led by a lawyer and supported by four hundred residents—is trying to block any changes but is open to the addition of explanatory texts that could shed critical light on the role of the named individual in the past.
Symbolic struggles can be important in some historical situations, or even unavoidable, such as during the Weimar Republic with the controversy between the black-red-gold colors of the whole German democracy since the early nineteenth century and the widely accepted black-white-red of the empire, which combined the black and white of Prussia and the Hanseatic red and white. After 1918–19 millions took part in the competition between black-red-gold and black-white-red. Yet even if only small minorities are directly involved and the majority is initially apathetic, it is important in some cases to support the change of an untenable name. But symbolic struggles tie up forces.
It is not an accident that the high point of renamings, like the monument toppling in the United States and the United Kingdom, is taking place in a historical phase during which a large part of the left spectrum has turned to an emphasis on racial, ethnic, and sexual (including multiple genders) group identities and their public recognition, instead of the social question and broad perspectives on society. Instead of an underestimation of identities we now face their absolutization. The negative slogan of the “old, white men” may have some limited validity in the United States; in Germany it is foolish and deceptive. Anyone who wants to shape and change society needs majorities from the lower and middle classes of the population, even if these are more heterogeneous than a half century ago. To drape the majority of society’s underprivileged (who even in a global sense are only very relatively privileged) in the penance garb of “the whites” is objectively untenable and politically counterproductive.
