Berlin to rename 'Moor Street' after anti-racism protests

Berlin has announced that it will rename Moor Street - Mohrenstraße in German - after years of protests surrounding the controversial street name.

The central street, which is located in the city’s trendy Mitte district, will now be called Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Strasse in honour of the country’s first black scholar. The decision was made by the centre-left Social Democrats and the left-wing Green party, who overruled a motion put forward by left-wing factions that a naming committee be established to review the street name.

While the street name has been the target of criticism for decades, outrage has grown in recent weeks following widespread Black Lives Matter protests in Berlin and across Germany in the wake of the death of American man George Floyd.

The Berlin Mitte district office said that the renaming should take place “immediately” in order to “remove the existing racist core of the name, which incriminates and harms the national and international reputation of Berlin”.

Anton Wilhelm Amo was Germany’s first black scholar. He taught at several universities in central Germany and received a doctorate from the University of Halle in 1729.

Amo, originally from what is now Ghana, also has a controversial back story, with historians failing to come to agreement on how he arrived in Germany.

Some believe Amo was abducted by the Dutch West India Company and brought to Germany, while others argue that he was enslaved in Germany by judicial authorities.

Despite being lauded by mainstream political parties, the decision was not without controversy.

The Berliner Zeitung criticised the “quick” decision as being an example of “political hypocrisy” and “cancel culture”; “the switching off of unpopular ideas and the eradication of historically sensitive names or images has achieved a new quality in Berlin” the newspaper wrote on Friday.

Oliver Frederici of the centre-right Christian Democrats said “we disapprove of the obsession with renaming things”.

In July, the BVG, Berlin’s transport authority, voted to change the name of the Mohrenstrasse underground train station to Glinkastraße after an adjacent street which honours Russian composer Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka.

The Berlin Senate blocked the change, with the BVG now searching for a new name for the station.