Me

 

My name is Rosamund, a software developer with a background in translation and writing. I'm originally from the UK and have been living in Berlin since 2014.

 

I've always been obsessed with maps and streets, even designing my own towns when I was a kid. Since moving to Berlin, this has reached a whole new level. Given the multiple layers of Berlin's history that draw the interest of people from the world over, there's quite a bit for me left to uncover.

 

I got the idea for this project when on my lockdown walks, I started noticing how many Berlin streets — particularly newer ones — were named after women. Whenever I looked them up later on, I was often impressed by their stories of courage, sacrifice, innovation, and frequently tragedy. Sadly, it would seem that the majority of them were relegated to another side of history, because aside with a handful of exceptions, I don't hear much about them otherwise. Even less so in English-language contexts.

 

Some of these figures will ring more bells than others. Even if we don't know exactly what they're known for, they're part of our daily lives. For instance, anyone who's taken a Sunday stroll from Alexanderplatz to Kollwitzplatz will have heard of Rosa Luxemburg; she has a whole street and a square. But they might not be aware of exactly how she shaped Berlin as we know it today.

 

 

Context

 

In terms of gender, the distribution of Berlin's street names is lopsided. According to this report, only 500-600 streets are named after women, compared to some 3,000 named after men. To counter this, a Frauenquote (quota of streets named after women) is in effect, meaning that any new street that is built must be named after a woman. This is part of what's known as gender mainstreaming.

 

After the Berlin Wall fell, swathes of vacant land sprung up not only along the parts where it had once divided the city, but also in spaces where decrepit GDR-era buildings had been knocked down. Since then, rapid development and the resulting permastate of 'becoming and never being' — according to art critic Karl Scheffler in 1910 — is said to characterise Berlin.

 

Within the constraints of this project, the areas where this phenomenon is perhaps most obvious are at Hauptbahnhof (west of Washingtonplatz) and off Warschauer Straße (around the Mercedes Benz Arena). But, also randomly in a corner of Neukölln where you probably can't get a flat white with oat milk served to you by a Melburnian! That's the kind of place I'm most interested in.

 

Some other key words and concepts I have in mind with this project: digital humanities, psychogeography, geocaching.

 

 

Transparency

 

These pages are very much a work in progress and it will take a while before the content aspect is even close to finished. However, it was important for me to publish the website before it was complete, because I'm not sure exactly how long it's going to take. It's perfectly usable even if not every entry is there.

 

Here's a rough sketch of my process:

 

Use a combination of web scraping and manual research to identify the relevant streets, women linked to them, and core information such as location. Document these in a spreadsheet and mark to-be-visited streets on a map visible only to me. (This step is fully complete.)

 

If I'm going somewhere in the city, check map for whether there are any streets nearby I can take a quick detour to for a photo; otherwise, do an expedition in my free time.

 

When I have taken a photo of the street sign, upload it to an external image hosting service.

 

Record these entries in a CMS with information gleaned from the spreadsheet, add photo; put together a summarised biography of the person. Unless stated otherwise, the information that I add to the pages is in the public domain, and the translations from German quotations are my own.

 

Do final checks, mark it as done, then it becomes instantly available to view on the website.