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S. Frank:
"Negotiating the German Colonial Past in Berlin´s African Quarter";
Talk: Cultural Heritage Seminar Series 2016, Melbourne (invited); 2016-02-24.

This presentation will introduce the ongoing dispute over street names in Berlin´s Afrikanisches Viertel (African Quarter). 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 colonized by the German Empire, or after German colonial protagonists. In 2004, several NGOs called for a 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, the seminar will delineate how `insider´ and `outsider´ positions have been allocated in the debate over street names on three levels: while `agency´ can be traced back to the competing actors´ different positioning in the political field, the levels of `temporality´ and `spatiality´ belong to the realm of fundamental ideas about the world and one´s place in it. Carving out the authoritative power of `traditional´ notions of permanence, and of place and space, this presentation seeks to bring temporality and spatiality right into the focus of those studying heritage-making practices.