Berlin Divided Over Way to Honor Star

“Death need not be feared,” Marlene Dietrich once said, to which the Berlin newspaper Tageszeitung replies: “Perhaps not death, but everything that comes after it.”

Witness the petty indignities that the late film star’s memory has been made to endure as Berlin sorts out the best way to honor its famous daughter, born in the middle-class borough of Schoeneberg in 1901.

Politicians of every persuasion have been eager to name a city landmark after Dietrich, who was buried here after her death in Paris in 1992. A street seems to many the obvious choice. And indeed, after studying the map, a group of center-left office-holders has proposed one: Tempelhofer Weg, a three-block stretch running through an obscure part of Schoeneberg.

Alas for Dietrich, it would be hard to find a street less in keeping with the image of glamour, imperiousness and sophistication she worked so hard to project.

Tempelhofer Weg crosses what might politely be called a “light industrial area,” laid out near the end of a busy highway. It is a realm of weedy yards, chain-link fences and junked bathtubs, boasting a couple of scrap yards, two car-repair shops, a water purification equipment dealership, a carpenter’s shop and a handful of other humble enterprises. Not a top hat or a pair of silk stockings for miles around.

How did the city come up with this?

The official answer is that Dietrich’s coffin was borne down Tempelhofer Weg on its way to the cemetery. But reality is more complex. Dietrich’s misfortune is to have been born and buried in a city suffering from a bad case of name-change indigestion.

Aristocrats and dictators, Cold Warriors and Communists--each new political class that has come and gone here in the last century has literally wiped its predecessor’s heroes’ names off the map. After World War II, for instance, all those signs saying “Adolf Hitler Strasse” were quickly disposed of.

And in the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, such notable Germans as the prewar feminist Clara Zetkin and the anti-Nazi martyr Kaethe Niederkirchner have likewise been rendered politically incorrect. Their streets have been renamed.

These frequent, ideologically driven name changes have caused widespread hurt feelings, and many Berliners now say enough is enough. So when the Dietrich commemorators were shopping around for a street to re-christen, there was virtually nothing left that wouldn’t offend someone if renamed.

The name Tempelhofer Weg has no political connotations, meaning as it does simply, the street running from Schoeneberg to the neighboring borough of Tempelhof.

What the planners did not anticipate were the cries of outrage from the people running those drab family businesses on Tempelhofer Weg. Some of them say they have no problem naming a street after Dietrich, but they don’t want the politicians to pass the costs on to them.

One businessman, the water purification equipment dealer, says that changing Tempelhofer Weg to Marlene Dietrich Strasse will set him back $35,000: He has sold more than 5,000 clean-water devices all over Germany, and by law he will have to install a new metal address plate on each of them.