The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Part 1

Part 2, Chapters 3-4

Part 2, Chapters 5-7

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5-Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3: “Politics”

Part 3, Chapter 8 Summary: “Iran: Why Do Street Names Follow Revolutionaries?”

Chapter 8 explores the controversies surrounding streets named in honor of revolutionary figures. Pedram Moallemian was an Iranian man who grew up in Tehran in the late 1970s, when the revolutionary spirit dominated Iran. When Moallemian was a teenager, he and his friends painted over a sign for Winston Churchill Street—the location of the British Embassy in Tehran—so that it read Bobby Sands Street, in honor of an Irish Republican Army (IRA) revolutionary. Sands, who was arrested for attempting to bomb a furniture store, died while on a hunger strike in a British prison.

For Moallemian and many young Iranians, Bobby Sands represented much-needed resistance to British colonial power. Like the Irish, the people of Iran were intimately familiar with British abuses of power: In 1953, the British and American governments helped engineer a coup against a democratically elected leader. As a result of popular support for Sands, Moallemian’s youthful prank had a lasting impact, as the people of Tehran informally accepted the name. Shortly after, city officials formalized the change. As a result, the British embassy chose to add a new entrance on a different street to avoid naming an anti-colonial revolutionary every time they gave their address.

Moallemian’s act of renaming belongs to a long tradition of street signs memorializing revolutionaries. In 18th-century revolutionary Paris, a priest named Henri Grégoire wrote a treatise on street names. Grégoire, who advocated for the rights of Jewish people and the abolition of slavery, was tasked with identifying new names for the streets of Paris in the years following the Revolution. He wanted the new Paris street signs to reflect the New France, arguing that street signs should both contribute to a moral education and be aesthetically pleasing. For Grégoire, that meant replacing street names previously named after royalty and church figures with new names honoring revolutionary figures and ideals. Mask contextualizes this within the scope of other Revolutionary projects, such as the fad for revolutionary first names.

Throughout history, revolutionary governments have sought to solidify their regime changes by changing street names. Mexico has over 500 streets named after the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, and Russia has over 5,000 streets dedicated to Lenin. Revolutionary street names can also change: In Spain, for example, streets formerly named in honor of fascist government leaders are being forcibly replaced with streets named in honor of women like Frida Kahlo. Mask ends the chapter by noting that, although there are streets honoring Bobby Sands in France and across the world, there are none in Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland. She argues that, because the peace in Ireland is so recent and so tenuous, a street named after Bobby Sands would be too controversial to be widely accepted.

Part 3, Chapter 9 Summary: “Berlin: What do Nazi Street Names Tell Us About Vergangenheitsbewältigung?”

Chapter 9 examines politically motivated street name changes in Germany during and after World War II. Mask begins with the work of conceptual artist Susan Hiller, whose J Street Project was designed to highlight the hundreds of streets in Germany with a variant of the word “Jew” in the name. Over the course of the project, Hiller learned that these street names are both descriptive and prescriptive, mapping the lives of Jewish Germans by showing where they were allowed to live, work, and travel throughout history. Most of these street names pre-date the war, and likely changed during the Nazi regime, then were restored after the war as a sign of respect.

During the Nazi regime, many street names including the word “Jew” or honoring Jewish figures were changed to honor Adolf Hitler and other Nazi figures. By 1938 it was illegal to have a street name including the word “Jew”: These disappearing street names reflected the genocidal violence being enacted on Jewish populations in Germany. The Nazis considered street names to be the perfect propaganda because it allowed the state to enforce memorialization. Even the town of Judenburg—or “Jews’ castle”—considered changing its name, although citizens eventually decided against it.

After the war ended, these newly minted street names were quickly changed again: The first item on the agenda for the first meeting of Berlin mayors after the war was street name changes. She uses the example of Berlin—which was divided into two new cities, East and West Berlin—to demonstrate the power of revolutionary street names. In East Berlin, which was controlled by Soviet forces, many Nazi street names were changed to honor communist figures, such as Hans and Sophie School, siblings who were brutally murdered for protesting Nazi policies.

After the reunification of Germany in 1989, however, these communist street names posed their own problems. For many people living in East Berlin, the communist-themed street names seemed like a relic of divided Germany, and continued to mark them as “Easterners.” Street names were thus changed again, this time to reflect the unification of Germany, although not without significant debate. Mask notes that, today, this conflicting history of street names makes it hard for Berliners of different generations to agree on a communal map.

In the chapter’s conclusion, Mask connects this constant debate to the German concept of vergangenheitsbewältigung, a complex compound that roughly translates to “the process of working through the past.” For Mask, this concept usefully explains the frequent street name changes in Germany: She argues that street names are a tool used by societies to work out the trauma and mistakes of the past. She ends by wondering if this process can ever truly be considered finished.

Part 3 Analysis

Chapters 8 and 9 of the book constitute Part 3, “Politics,” which moves away from the development and origins of addressing systems to explore the uses of street addresses to achieve political goals. These chapters describe the concrete implementation of theories described earlier in the book. Chapter 4, for example, explores the various origins of street names; Chapter 8 demonstrates how street signs can be changed as an act of political protest. Similarly, Chapter 5 describes how Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa, one of the first to order systematic house numbering, used a different color to number the homes of Jewish citizens; Chapter 9 depicts the use of street names containing the word “Jew” in Nazi Germany to restrict the movement of Jewish people.

The Link Between Street Addresses and Inequality and The Importance of Street Addresses in Building Community both play an important role in these two chapters. As the J Street Project demonstrates, street names can document where marginalized communities—as, in this case, the Jews—were allowed to live, mirroring wider systems of discrimination and inequality. These demarcations within cities also mark how “community” is defined by the dominant powers of a society, with the Jews frequently segregated and excluded from the dominant Christian society in Western countries over the centuries. Likewise, in renaming streets with Judaic connotations or connections to reflect the new Nazi government, the Nazis were both trying to erase the history and communal presence of the Jews within German society and further assert their dominance over their victims. In this sense, street names can not only define community, but also reveal who is not allowed to be a part of a given community.

The incidents surrounding naming and renaming streets associated with revolutionary figures also speak to The Importance of Street Addresses in Building Community, as these changes reflect the political and social values of a place at a given period. For Moallemian and his accomplices, renaming the street in Tehran the British Embassy was a means of rejecting British colonial interference, not just in Ireland but in Iran itself. Their choice of Bobby Sands as the figure for the street’s new name reflected both their combative attitude towards British colonialism—since Sands was an IRA fighter—and the revolutionary fervor that was gaining ground in Iranian society at this time.

Similarly, the naming and renaming of streets in East Berlin reflect the community’s shifting values during and after the period of Soviet domination. During the decades of allegiance with the USSR, East Berlin reflected communist revolutionary values by having many streets named after communist figures, signaling their new political stance. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall and reunification, however, these same street names became anathema to the new democratic spirit of post-Soviet Berlin, and were rejected and changed all over again. As with the renaming of Winston Churchill Street in Tehran, street names can embody the acceptance or, conversely, the rejection of certain political values by a community.

As Mask notes, the absence of a certain street name can also reflect the state of a community. She argues that neither Northern Ireland nor the Republic of Ireland have named a street after Bobby Sands, because the wounds of their civil conflict are still too fresh. For Mask, the dangers of British imperialism are obvious, and Sands’s martyrdom seems worth celebrating; yet, she admits that for the people of Ireland, where “the peace never feels fully secure” (157), Sands represents a time of traumatic violence, not necessarily heroic resistance to oppression. As Mask notes, street names can act as commemoration of someone, and a Bobby Sands Street would act as a commemoration of his acts and the IRA at large. Mask argues that Ireland is unwilling or perhaps unable to commemorate this period in its history just yet.

Together, these chapters prepare the groundwork for the next section, which is about a particularly contentious element of politics: race. Although the conflicts described in Chapters 8 and 9 are not explicitly related to race, many of the issues of oppression and violence raised in this section appear in later chapters. Chapter 9, which describes attempts by Nazi officials and sympathizers to replace names related to Judaism with names celebrating Nazism, is particularly important in this regard. For many American readers, Nazi Germany represents the pinnacle of genocidal oppression, and Mask’s arguments about the abuse of street names in this chapter are easy to accept. This primes readers to receive Mask’s next two chapters, which focus on racist street name practices in the United States, many of which echo the Nazi practices.