Plans to rename 'racist' Berlin U-Bahn station run into trouble
Critics say new name honours 'anti-Semitic' Russian composer
www.telegraph.co.uk
Oh dear, you had better not let the politically correct brigade get anywhere near this article.
If "Moor Street" is considered as a "racist" name for a railway station, what about the station of exactly the same name which exists in Birmingham?
Then we have Moorfields, Moorgate, Moorside and Moorthorpe stations on the national rail network, not to mention several stations beginning with the word "white" or "black".
Don't get me wrong, I deplore racism as much as any right thinking person should, but I cannot agree with the notion that a station name such as "Moor Street" is "racist".
Plans to rename a central Berlin U-Bahn station in the wake of the anti-racism movement have run into opposition amid claims the new name will honour an anti-Semite.
Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG), the German capital’s public transport company, last week announced plans to rename Mohrenstrasse station “out of understanding and respect”.
The name translates as Moor Street, which is widely considered a derogatory term for black people.
The BVG initially won praise when it announced the station would be renamed Glinkastrasse, or Glinka Street, after another nearby street.
But the plans have provoked a backlash from critics who claim Mikhail Glinka, the Russian composer in whose honour the street is named, was an anti-Semite.
Glinka, one of the first Russian composers to gain widespread recognition, is considered the “father of Russian music”.
But he described the Jewish composer Anton Rubinstein with the derogatory term “zhid” in a letter, and has been described as an anti-Semite by the leading American musicologist Richard Taruskin.
Calls to change the name of the station have grown in the wake of anti-racism protests CREDIT: CLEMENS BILAN/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
The BVG said it had selected Glinkastrasse as neutral new name for the U-Bahn station because it was a nearby street, rather than in honour of the composer.
“We didn’t make the decision in favour of a name, we decided to act against one that is widely seen as a derogatory term,” a spokesman for the company told Bild newspaper.
The station’s name has been changed many times over the years. When it opened in 1908, it was called Kaiserhof after a nearby hotel.
But it was in East Berlin during the Cold War division of Germany and was renamed twice by the communist East German authorities, first in honour of Ernst Thälmann, a communist politician murdered by the Nazis, and later after Otto Grotewohl, an East German leader.
It was renamed Mohrenstrasse after German reunification, when the Berlin authorities removed communist names from the city map.
Ramona Pop, the business minister in the Berlin regional government, praised the BVG for “sending a clear signal against discrimination” and called for an “open debate on the future name of the station”.
There are so far no plans to rename Mohrenstrasse, the street where the station lies.
