According to Walther, a Chinese fort was shot down with the gunboat Iltis in June 1900 Photo: picture alliance / akg-images
From BZ/dpa
What is meant is not the animal, but a gunboat of the Imperial Navy: According to a Berlin initiative, Iltisstraße in Dahlem should be renamed.
She advocates using the street near the Freie Universität (FU) instead to commemorate the former FU student and later Namibia’s first ambassador to Germany, Nora Schimming.
Around 80 signatures from supporters of this proposal are to be forwarded to the district mayor of Steglitz-Zehlendorf, Maren Schellenberg (Greens), and the district assembly, said co-initiator Christian Walther of the German Press Agency.
According to the initiative, the supporters specifically requested include FU President Günther Ziegler and several of his predecessors. Other supporters come from science, politics and various organizations. Among them are the former Federal Government Commissioner for Foreigners Cornelia Schmalz-Jacobsen, Berlin’s former Senator for Social Affairs Elke Breitenbach and the former Senator for Science Jürgen Zöllner. According to its own statements, the initiative has largely dispensed with involving active politicians in order to avoid being pigeonholed.
According to Walther, a Chinese fort was shot down with the gunboat Iltis in June 1900. The neighboring streets are named after the then Captain Wilhelm Lans and after the fort called Taku. The three names stand for “one of the darkest chapters in the history of German colonialism,” it said. While the name of Takustraße could be left as is from the point of view of the initiative with an additional explanation, the proposal for renaming Lansstraße after the founding director of the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Free University, Ernst Fraenkel, has been circulating for some time.
The student administration of the Free University is located in Iltisstraße. It is an important link between the Dahlem-Dorf underground station and numerous university buildings.