2023-04-20 20:43:12
Street in Pankow-Heinersdorf should be named after the garden architect. Culture Committee now refers to Parliament.
The town hall of Pankow: This is where the district office is located, which made the decision on Herta-Hammerbacher-Straße, which is now to be overturned. Schoening/Imago
Pankow’s parliament should overturn the district office decision in favor of Herta-Hammerbacher-Strasse made at the end of last year and decide for itself whether to rename it to Heinersdorf. That crystallized on Wednesday evening in the culture committee. The corresponding motion by the Greens was unanimously added: The people’s representatives want to examine the role of the garden architect in the Nazi era more closely and have an alternative name ready. Representatives of the Pankow Women’s Advisory Board, whose word carries great weight in such cases, named Beate Hahn, for example, who published a number of garden educational guides between 1936 and 1962. It is unclear whether the parliamentarians can still stop Herta-Hammerbacher-Straße.
It had long been known that Hammerbacher also had a brown thumb – thanks to the Technical University of Berlin. Jeong-Hi Go uncovered it in the mid-noughties. In her dissertation, she identifies a good 600 projects that can be clearly dated and attributed to Hammerbacher. Almost two-thirds of these were created during the Nazi era.
Career boost for Herta Hammerbacher under the Nazis
The career advancement of those years is made even clearer by the design tasks: before that, Hammerbacher didn’t design a park or a settlement – after that, garden shows in Stuttgart, Cologne and Kassel, among other places, public buildings, including the TU campus, and commercial projects piled up. From 1933 to 1945, Hammerbacher made all of this. In addition, she helped with the forced resettlement of South Tyrolean Germans to Austria, camouflaged war-related infrastructure and greened camp barracks for conscripts.
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