Berlin / Pankow – A week ago Ute Linz wrote a letter to the Pankow mayor. She congratulated Sören Benn on the election. And she reminded him that her first email to him began with the same words exactly five years ago. And that the thing was already a year old. “So now the third electoral period of the district assembly begins, in which hopefully a decision will be made on the renaming of Robert-Rössle-Strasse,” wrote Linz.
The retired doctor, who comes from Aachen and lives in Kaulsdorf, is fighting for the street to be renamed Buch. She has read thousands of files and familiarized herself with the life of Robert Rössle. Rössle headed the Pathological Institute at the Charité from 1929 to 1948. Ute Linz is convinced that Rössle was a pioneer of the racial theories of the Nazis – and part of their “murder machine at the Charité”.
Six years ago, on November 24, 2015, she wrote her first letter to the Pankow district office. The district office politicians and BVV officials have not yet reached a decision in the Rössle case. Perhaps, however, there will be movement in the matter – after the last election, the Greens are the largest parliamentary group in Pankow. The party that supported Ute Linz’s cause years ago.
Oliver Jütting first heard of the matter in 2018, he says. “The topic triggered me. I found the concern right. ”In May 2018, he and Cordelia Koch, both of whom were parliamentary group leaders of the Greens, submitted an application to the BVV. BVV should check whether “the requirements for renaming Robert-Rössle-Straße to Berlin-Buch are in place”.
Three scenarios for the future of the road
The “Implementing Regulations for Section 5 of the Berlin Roads Act” regulate when a street can be renamed. This is possible, among other things, if it is named after a person who was one of the “active opponents of democracy and at the same time intellectual and political pioneers and advocates of National Socialist ideology and tyranny”.
Did Rössle belong to this group? In June 2018, BVV referred the question to the culture committee, which in August 2018 spoke out in favor of an examination.
Bernt Roder heads the department for district history work at the district office, which also includes the Pankow Museum. He asked experts to comment on the Rössle case, including those from the Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine, and organized a public discussion event that took place in December 2019. Roder then collected all of the statements and contributions to the discussion on the case in one document. “Our job is to make the discourse transparent,” he says. At the meeting on July 13, 2020, the documents were handed over to the technical committee and were therefore available to any BVV officer interested in the Rössle case.
Roder and his colleagues also looked at the question of how things could go on and suggested three “alternative scenarios”: the street will be renamed, a sign refers to the old name; the street keeps its name, a sign refers to the “controversial person Robert Rössle”; the street will keep its name on the grounds of the Buch campus, as it is a private road there, but the other part will be renamed.
The scenarios were presented to the Culture Committee in August 2020. Almost a year later, in May 2021, the committee looked at the case again. Ute Linz, the historian Thomas Beddies and a representative of the Max-Delbrück-Centrum, which has its headquarters on Rössle-Straße, were there via zoom. Result: none.
A lot was checked and referenced in Pankow, so that more than three years passed, that much can be said. The Rössle case became something “that floats a bit,” says Oliver Jütting from the Greens. He was not a member of the culture committee himself. Then, in September 2021, there was re-election.
And everything starts all over again: a new proposal, a new culture committee, a new vote. But Jütting, who has been head of BVV Pankow since the beginning of November, no longer wants to check, wait, and refer. He wants to apply now.
He knows how complex the debate is, he says. At the event in Buch in December 2019, it became clear to him that the dispute was also about the East German scientists who worked in the street or the former Rössle clinic. He calls it a “proxy debate”. The road has become a symbol. “It’s about something that no longer has anything to do with Rössle.” Nevertheless, he is in favor of the renaming. “Rössle wasn’t Mengele, but he profited from the Nazi regime. And today you would never dream of naming a street after him. “
On January 12, at the first BVV in the new year, the Greens will submit the application, says Jütting. “Then there is a vote and we will see whether the matter finds a majority.” Of 55 district councilors, 28 would have to approve. The Greens have 16 votes in BVV.
The mayor’s personal opinion
Sören Benn, the old and new mayor of Pankow, does not yet know anything about the initiative of the Greens, but he could meet him. Benn had actually promised Ute Linz that the decision on Rössle-Strasse would be made this year. And theoretically, the district office could also have decided on the renaming itself. But such an important decision, so Benn, should rather be made by a “politically broad public” in the BVV.
Benn points out that he had the road law for Berlin changed in order to make a renaming possible at all. For a long time it was said there that street names “from the period from 1933 to 1945” can be changed. So names that were given during National Socialism. Since December 2020 it has been said: Street names “with reference to the period from 1933 to 1945” can be changed. Robert-Rössle-Straße did not get its name until 1974.
He hopes that the new culture committee, which will be formed on December 7th, will put the matter on the agenda in January and make a recommendation for the BVV, says Benn. Of course, a direct BVV application is also possible. As a member of the district office, he will not vote. But he has a “personal opinion”: He thinks the renaming is right. With a comment that the street was called differently and why it was renamed. “Rössle supported the state in the Nazi Reich, did not offer any resistance and this phase was longer than the one after the war, for which he was honored in the GDR,” he says. This has nothing to do with cancel culture and a devaluation of the decision made back then to name the road to Rössle, “but with correcting the mistake with today’s knowledge”.
And the East Germans, to whom the name means a lot? Aren’t there many left-wing voters among them? “It’s not about consideration for supposed left voters. It’s about an appreciation in public space, “says Benn.
The third largest parliamentary group in BVV Pankow is that of the SPD, the chairman of the parliamentary group refers to Stephanie Wölk, who sat on the culture committee. Wölk says that she is assuming that the new culture committee, in which she wants to work again, will “call up the renaming issue again and finally discuss it”, but she cannot yet say anything about the position of her group. The FDP is similarly evasive. Group leader Thomas Enge wrote in response to the request from the Berliner Zeitung: “We will abstain from this application because the final reassessment of Mr. Rössle’s life’s work has not yet been carried out by an independent third party.”
A sentence that Ute Linz has heard many times from politicians in Pankow. Sometimes things are too small, sometimes too complicated, sometimes not yet explored enough. After six years, it could be summed up in Pankow, there are many expert assessments, one motion, one abstention, and the mayor has a personal opinion.
But there are also the citizens of Buch. The fourth-largest parliamentary group, the CDU, invokes this. Denise Bittner is parliamentary group leader there. She says that she is not a historian, that she does not want to allow herself to judge, that politics is dependent on “reports from independent experts or committees”. She could well imagine a “critical historical commentary” on the street name, “should that be necessary”.
Renaming a street would have an impact on many people, says Bittner, in this case on the residents of Buch, “who spoke out against the renaming at a citizens’ meeting”, but also on traders, the campus. From the point of view of the CDU parliamentary group in Pankow, the opinions of those affected are of great importance in the decision.
Illustration: Stephanie F. Scholz
The Robert Rössle case
In the last weeks we explored the Robert Rössle case in detailed interviews and texts. In the next week the last part: Behind the research – two reporters report
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