Like a pendulum, Berlin has swung from being an avant-garde libertine city during the Weimar Republic, to the repressive capital of Nazi Germany where homosexuality was a crime, to today’s left-wing, gender-neutral metropolis.

Symbolizing those abrupt changes in identity, Berliners are now debating renaming Pacelliallee – a major street named after Rome-born Eugenio Pacelli (1876–1958), better known as Pope Pius XII – to honor former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir (1898-1978).

Pacelli, also called Il Papa Tedesco (the German Pope) was no stranger to Germany, and the street in leafy Steglitz-Zehlendorf was not arbitrarily named after him. Pius XII served as the Apostolic Nuncio in Munich, Bavaria – the equivalent of the Vatican’s ambassador in Berlin – from 1917 to 1920.

While Pacelli’s name holds great significance for German Catholics, it is also highly controversial. On July 20, 1933, half a year after the Nazis seized power, serving as the Vatican’s Cardinal Secretary of State, he secured the Reichskonkordat (the treaty defining relations between the Holy See and the newly-established Third Reich). Succeeding Pius XI in 1939, Pius XII headed the Vatican during the Nazi occupation of Rome in 1943-1944. He failed to stop – or even protest – the Nazis’ deportation of Rome’s Jews to death camps in 1943. He remained the leader of the faithful until his death in 1958.

According to Die Berliner Zeitung newspaper, Ralf Balke and Julien Reitzenstein have started a campaign to rename the leafy street as Golda-Meir-Allee, in tribute to Israel’s first (and only) female prime minister. Meir is known as the “Iron Lady” of Israeli politics. She was born in Kiev in the Russian empire and grew up in Belarus and the U.S., where she became active in the Zionist movement.

Balke and Reitzenstein describe Pope Pius XII as a “highly problematic character” and claim there are “countless examples” of his anti-Semitism, racism and misogyny.  As someone who “used the Catholic Centre Party as a pawn in his policy of Nazi appeasement” and is accused of enabling the culprits of Nazi crimes to escape justice after the war, they believe his name is “extremely unsuitable” for a street in modern-day Germany.

The two Berlin historians defend their petition to rename Pacelliallee as a "differentiated debate" rather than an anti-Catholic action.

"To turn the impetus between two historians in a differentiated debate into an 'anti-Catholic campaign' says more about the culture of debate than about our initiative," Reitzenstein said recently on the Internet portal www.kathisch.de.

Their petition only addresses "individual acts in the long life of one of countless people" but hinges of Pius XII’s wartime record. Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany, and accusations of anti-Semitism are socially charged. The Federal Government's anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix Klein, backs the historians’ initiative, saying the wartime pope “was silent” on the Holocaust and the murder of Sinti and Roma people, many of whom were Catholics themselves – or at least “did not protest audibly”. 

That bitter controversy regarding whether Pius XII was a Nazi sympathizer has rankled Germany for decades, especially since 1963 when Rolf Hochhuth staged his play, Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy).

The Apostolic Nunciature in Berlin, however, is critical of the petition. The allegations against Pacelli are “well known,” declared the Vatican embassy. They have "long been campaign features" and they must be contradicted. "If the demand is made not to name a street in Berlin after Eugenio Pacelli because he was not ‘audible enough' that is simply dubious.”

According to kathisch.de, 16 streets or squares are named after Pacelli across Germany. Apart from Oberhausen in the Ruhr where the Pacellistrasse was renamed Christoph-Schlingensief-Strasse in 2012, so far, however, there have been no debates similar to that in Berlin.

The debate about dropping Pacelliallee comes after Berlin’s city hall announced last summer that it is renaming Mohrenstraße (“Moor Street”) in the city’s Mitte district after the country’s first Black philosopher, Anton Wilhelm Amo.

Gil Zohar was born in Toronto, Canada and moved to Jerusalem, Israel in 1982. He is a journalist writing for The Jerusalem Post, Segula magazine, and other publications. He’s also a professional tour guide who likes to weave together the Holy Land’s multiple narratives.