120 Blind Dates... And Other Short Stories

#Vote#Weekendwritein: The Street of January 13

Author's Note: I wrote this because the 86th anniversary of the Saar status referendum is coming up this week. It is a difficult subject matter, and I hope nobody will feel insulted that I have chosen to write about this. I haven't made up the fact that there are still streets in the Saarland (as the region is nowadays called) with this name. In some cases, there have been initiatives to rename the street in question.
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Can had always wondered why the street he lived in was called The Street of January 13, but not one of the friends he played football with knew the answer to that question, and even when he asked his grandfather about it, he didn't know what had happened on January 13. Baba shrugged and said it was a very old name. The street had already had its name when he had arrived with his wife and little son, Can's father, from Turkey more than 40 years ago.

He only found out about the significance of January 13, 1935 when he was bored one day and skimmed through his History book. By then, he was in 9th grade, and they had just begun to talk about the Third Reich in class.

The funny thing was that not a single one of his teachers had ever told him about the fact that the region he lived in had not been a part of Germany for some time following the two world wars and that there had been two referendums, both of which had ended with landslide victories in favour of Germany. Even when his History class had covered the Versailles Treaty a few weeks ago, his teacher had forgotten to mention the significance of the Saar status referendum on January 13, 1935. Perhaps she didn't know either as she was barely 30 years old.

It was only then that Can realised that history didn't end in the classroom at school because he knew next to nothing about the region he had been born in except the sights, to which he had been often enough on school excursions. After consulting Google on the matter, he wrote a letter to the mayor, asking him to hold a public debate on the question whether the name of his street, "The Street of January 13," should be changed. In his letter, he stressed the fact that he felt ambivalent about the matter: On the one hand, even a dark day in the history of the region deserved to be remembered in some way. On the other, it was a whole different situation if you lived in a street that bore this name and knew what it was actually referring to: On January 13, 1935, over 90% of the voters had been in favour of a reunification with Germany. They had been a free people, and it had been a free referendum, but the country they had wanted to join hadn't been free.