BERLIN - Germany's main conservative opposition Christian Democrats have called on Berlin city government to name a square or a street after former US Republican President Ronald Reagan, who died on the weekend.
"We should recognize his commitment to unification through a square or street near the Brandenburg Gate to be named after him," Germany's daily Bild Zeitung quoted CDU General Secretary Laurenz Meyer.
Reagan was president from 1981 and 1989 and had left office when communism imploded across Central Europe culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 and the in the historic unification of Germany less than a year later.
But in 1987 Reagan stood before the Berlin Wall at the city's Brandenburg Gate and called on then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall.''
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http://www.expatica.com/source/site_article.asp?subchannel_id=26&story_id=8293 As usual the German conservatives know nothing about the laws in Berlin. A street may only be named after a person that has been dead for at least five years. And even then: the last call has the district Parliament - those tend to be very down-to-earth.
Anyway: the streets around the Gate are all named - I'm waiting for a proposal: do they want "Rabin Straße" (named in honor of Yitzhak Rabin ) ?, "Unter den Linden/Straße des 17. Juni"(commemorating the victims of the uprising in June 1953) ? "Pariser Platz"? "Ebert Straße" (commemorating the first German Democratic President)? ...
No thanks!
http://www.berlin.de/stadtplan/map.asp