This street was named for the Electress Dorothea of Brandenburg in 1822. She was the wife of Elector Friedrich- Wilhelm of Brandenburg, also known as the Great Elector. History speaks of her as a notable woman who accompanied her husband to battle, was a savvy business investor, and influenced her husband’s political decisions. Alternatively, she is also written to have been a petty woman, who was scheming and greedy, badly inclined towards her stepchildren. Her stepson believed she tried to poison him on several occasions.
The street’s historic architecture was heavily destroyed during the Second World War. During the GDR, it was renamed Clara-Zetkin-Straße. Born Clara Eissner in 1857, Zetkin was a German Marxist theorist, activist, and an advocate for women’s rights. Until 1917, she was an active member of the Social Democrat Party, before later supporting the founding of the German Communist Party and representing them in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic from 1920 to 1933. From as early as 1874 she was active in Germany’s women and labour movements. However, under Chancellor Otto von Bismarcks repressive policy towards socialist activity in 1878, she fled into exile in Paris. This was where she adopted the name of her Russian-Jewish lover, Ossip Zetkin.
Passionately fighting for equal opportunities and suffrage women, Zetkin is remembered for contributing to the creation of the first International Women’s Day in 1911. She believed socialism was the only movement that could truly serve the needs of working class women. Furthermore, she organized an international women’s anti-war conference in Berlin in 1915. She was arrested several times during the First World War for her pacifist opinions.
After Hitler’s rise to power, she fled into exile in Moscow, where she died in 1933. Her name was removed from the Berlin street with argument that she was presented a politics that served as precursor for the totalitarian dictatorship of the GDR. Her globally valuable achievements for fighting for women’s liberation, for which Zetkin is internationally celebrated, are disregarded in favour of a member of a long obsolete Prussian nobility.
