Since March 2020, two clubs have been campaigning for the Erfurt Nettelbeckufer to be renamed Gert-Schramm-Ufer.

Joachim Nettelbeck (1738 to 1824) was involved in the transatlantic human trafficking as chief helmsman on Dutch enslavement ships; he tried to persuade three Prussian kings to acquire colonies.

Because of his role in the defense of Kolberg against Napoleon in 1807, he became a folk hero of German nationalism and a propaganda icon of the National Socialists.

Colonialism and National Socialism

While the memorial figure Nettelbeck connects colonialism and National Socialism on the perpetrator side, this connection can be found in Gert Schramm (1928 to 2016) on the victim side: He was a black survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, whose ancestors on his father's side had been enslaved to Cuba.

For his commitment as a contemporary witness against the right, he was honored with the Federal Cross of Merit in 2014.

Renaming the street would also have the strongest possible local anchoring: Gert Schramm was born on Erfurt's Nettelbeckufer.

With reference to the Erfurt initiative, the city of Dortmund decided in December 2020 to rename its Nettelbeckstrasse, and in August 2021 Berlin followed suit with the same decision for the local Nettelbeckplatz.

In Erfurt itself the situation is somewhat muddled.

This autumn there will be a round table at which supporters and opponents of the renaming will look for solutions together.

The Erfurt Nettelbeckufer has a peculiarity that was not sufficiently taken into account in the local renaming dispute: it was created in 1905 and was renamed once, namely in 1950 in Goerdelerufer, after Carl Friedrich Goerdeler (1884 to 1945), a leading representative of the conservative resistance against Hitler.

In 1956, Nettelbeck was reactivated as the namesake.

How did this renaming come about?

The Erfurt archives are silent on this question. And the fact that Goerdeler fell out of favor in the GDR historiography in the early 1950s does not easily explain the fact of the renaming. One answer, however, can be found in an article that the historian Thomas Stamm-Kuhlmann published in 2017 in the Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft: In the early GDR there was a positive reception of the anti-Napoleonic wars, which were part of a propaganda battle against the West's ties to the Federal Republic. As early as 1952 Walter Ulbricht gave the motto: "The national liberation struggle against the American, English and French occupiers in West Germany and for the overthrow of their vassal government in Bonn is the task of all peace-loving and patriotic forces in Germany."

Ernst Moritz Arndt and the University of Greifswald

East Germany has a prominent parallel history to Erfurt's Nettelbeckufer: that of the University of Greifswald.

Immediately after the transfer of power to the NSDAP in 1933, the university was named after Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769 to 1860), the journalist, poet and historian who had been a leading anti-Semitic hate preacher in early German nationalism.

In 1945 it lost its name, only to regain it in 1954 with the approval of the highest SED circles.

Only in 2018 was Arndt withdrawn from circulation again after years of struggle by parts of the professors as namesake - against the opposition of Chancellor Angela Merkel, the then local member of the Bundestag.