The more I read about German street names, the more I came across this word, a word that reminds me why I avoided German in school: Vergangenheitsbewältigung. It’s made up of two ideas—“the past” and “the process of coming to terms or coping.” It’s a word that is very German, and is often used to describe the nation’s reckoning with its Nazi past and the German division during the Cold War. But its meaning is universal. We all have the need to confront the past, memorialize it, struggle with it, do something with it. That something often involves street names.
