When a small German municipality creates a controversy of global proportions. A kindergarten’s plan to renounce the name of Anne Frank sparked outrage in Germany on Monday, with the Auschwitz committee expressing dismay “in these times of renewed anti-Semitism.”
Faced with numerous angry reactions, the municipality of Tangerhütte, west of Berlin, announced on its website on Monday that “a decision on the name change was not on the agenda”. “Discussions”, which began at the beginning of the year at the same time as the modernization of the kindergarten, “are continuing”, specified the municipality.
According to the local newspaper “Magdeburger Volkstimme”, the director of the kindergarten, Linda Schichor, believed that the story of Anne Frank was difficult for small children to understand. Hiding from the Nazis for two years in the Netherlands, Anne Frank wrote her famous diary, one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust, before perishing in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.
“We can only worry about the culture of memory”, judges the Auschwitz Committee
According to “Magdeburger Volkstimme”, the director of the kindergarten believed that parents with immigrant backgrounds did not understand this name. “We wanted something that didn’t have a political connotation,” said Linda Schichor.
A decision supported, according to this same newspaper, by the mayor of the city, Andreas Brohm, without label. But the plan to rename the school was notably castigated by the Auschwitz Committee, its executive vice-president, Christoph Heubner, calling the arguments put forward “idiotic” in an open letter to the mayor and those in charge of the kindergarten. .
“If we are ready to brush aside our own history so easily, precisely in these times of rising anti-Semitism and right-wing extremism, and if the name Anne Frank is perceived as inappropriate in the public space , we can only be concerned about the culture of memory in our country,” insisted Christoph Heubner.