Berlin has one of the most tumultuous histories of any city in the world, leaping from the Prussians to the Weimar Era to the Nazis to the Cold War in less than a century. Street names have, as Dirk Verheyen puts it, “been both substance and metaphor of Berlin’s struggle with identity.” Most recently protests spurred the city to change the names of the streets in the city’s Afrikanisches Viertel, or “African quarter,” where in the years before World War I, an animal and human zoo was planned (but never opened). The names commemorate men who participated in the enslavement, rape, and torture of
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