street sign, tubular post
2,25 m high, 2020

Sketch Clara-Zetkin-Allee, 2020

Clara-Zetkin-Allee

After the German Reunification, the christian-democratic Chancellor Helmut Kohl considered it unbearable that the address of the new German federal parliament happened to be named after Clara Zetkin. Thus, in 1995, Berlin’s Senator for Transportation Haase (equally CDU) defied the responsible district council of Berlin Mitte, which rejected the renaming of the address after an aristocrat in Dorotheenstraße. Clara Zetkin, feminist, socialist, communist and senior president, was the first democratically elected woman in a German parliament. Instead of renaming the street named after her before the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the installation is a plea for renaming the John-Foster-Dulles Allee into Clara-Zetkin-Allee. The renaming would involve few bureaucratic efforts, as the HKW is the only building in the street. The HKW exhibition Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and Cold War (2017/2018) has also revealed several good reasons which would justify the obliteration of the name of John Foster Dulles. The street sign is exhibited together with a fictitious letter.

Clara-Zetkin-Allee, exhibition view What could a non-sexist City look like? alpha nova & galerie futura, Berlin, 2020