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.
