A kindergarten’s plan to forego the name Anne Frank sparked outrage in Germany on Monday. The Auschwitz Committee expressed concern “in these times of renewed anti-Semitism.”
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Facing numerous angry reactions, the community of Tangerhütte (west of Berlin, in the former GDR) announced on its website on Monday that “a decision on the name change is not on the agenda.”
“The discussions,” which began at the beginning of the year at the same time as the modernization of the kindergarten, “will continue,” the municipality said.
Neither the mayor nor the head of the kindergarten could be reached to answer AFP’s questions.
According to the local newspaper Magdeburger Volksstimme, the head of the kindergarten, Linda Schichor, believed that the story of Anne Frank was difficult for young children to understand.
Anne Frank hid from the Nazis in the Netherlands for two years and wrote her famous diary, one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust, before dying in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.
According to “Magdeburger Volksstimme”, the head of the kindergarten believed that parents with a migration background did not understand the name. “We wanted something that had no political connotation,” Ms. Schichor said.
A decision that, according to the same newspaper, was supported without label by the city’s mayor, Andreas Brohm.
But the plan to rename the school was primarily criticized by the Auschwitz Committee. His deputy chairman Christoph Heubner described the arguments put forward as “idiotic” in an open letter to the mayor and those responsible for the kindergarten.
“If, especially in times of increasing anti-Semitism and right-wing extremism, we are prepared to so easily push our own history aside and the name Anne Frank is perceived as inappropriate in public space, this can only worry us about the culture of remembrance in our country,” emphasized Mr. Heubner .
The organization “Miteinander”, which has been fighting racism and anti-Semitism in the Saxony-Anhalt region (where Tangerhütte is located) for years, called the name change a “bad signal”.
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