Local councils have a hard time.

Throughout the year they diligently make decisions for the benefit of the citizens.

But nothing changes.

Local councilors can ask, suggest, and plead.

But if the city council and the magistrate are not interested in these suggestions and requests, the proposals are slowly ground down in the mills of parliamentary business and administration until nothing is left.

Gunter Murr

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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But there is one exception: the local councilors are solely responsible for naming streets, so nobody can interfere with them.

And so the district committee responsible for the Frankfurter Berg has now shown the magistrate who is in charge.

The city government had proposed naming the streets in the Hilgenfeld development area after women and men who campaigned for human and civil rights.

The Czech writer, dissident and later President Václav Havel will be there, as will the French philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir and the Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai.

The problem of correct pronunciation

But since the magistrate made the bill without the local council.

He thanks the magistrate for his "honourable and commendable suggestions" - and rejects them completely.

The district politicians refer to the negative vote of the Frankfurter Berg citizens' association, which is apparently bothered by the fact that in the city of Frankfurt, which presents itself as an international city, streets are named after people from foreign countries.

The "error-free pronunciation and writing of the name" is a "far underestimated challenge", the local advisory board quotes the association.

The magistrate has already cleared some orthographic hurdles and simply omitted the first name when proposing to name a place after the Indian philosopher Rabindranath Tagore.

And when it comes to pronunciation, the people of Frankfurt usually find such creative solutions as with the Ringstrasse in Sossenheim, which is named after the founder of the Red Cross, Henri Dunant.

In Frankfurt dialect it is Dunnandring, which doesn't sound French at all, with an emphasis on the u.

Heinrich Hofmann is missing an "f"

But there are other arguments that are not so easy for outsiders to grasp.

The district politicians argue that the personal names do not do justice to the previous agricultural uses and the ecologically oriented building plans, and have no connection to these areas.

So what to do?

Plants are never suspicious, and the streets on the Frankfurter Berg are mostly named after bushes and crops anyway.

So the solution is poppies instead of Václav Havel, delphiniums instead of Simone de Beauvoir, bindweed instead of Wangari Maathai.

The local council makes only one exception: a square is to be named after Heinrich Hofmann.

But there is already a Heinrich-Hoffmann-Strasse in Frankfurt, according to the magistrate the risk of confusion would be too great.

The local advisory board does not mean the doctor who became known as the author of "Struwwelpeter", but the long-standing chairman of the Frankfurter Berg citizens' association.

And that, you have to know, is only spelled with an f. But the local council is willing to compromise.

If Heinrich Hofmann cannot be considered, the place should be named differently.

Namely cornflowers.

Which would complete the suburban idyll.