On October 16, a square in Berlin's Kreuzberg district will stop honoring a Prussian field marshal who fought Napoleon and start honoring a Jewish teenager who fought Hitler. Blücherplatz becomes Eva-Mamlok-Platz — a renaming that is less about erasing history than about choosing which history a city centers. Eva Mamlok was born in 1918 into Berlin's Jewish middle class. By 14, she was a member of the Socialist Workers' Youth. By 15, she had climbed onto the roof of a department store on that very square and painted "Down with Hitler." She was caught. At 16, she was arrested for laying flowers at a commemoration for Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, classified as holding "hostile views toward the state," and sent to the Moringen women's concentration camp under the regime's "protective custody" euphemism — imprisonment without trial. After her release in May 1935, Mamlok continued underground resistance. Forced into compulsory labor at a Berlin screw factory in 1940, she formed what historians call the "Eva Mamlok Group" — an informal network of Jewish and non-Jewish women who distributed anti-Nazi leaflets, wrote anti-Hitler slogans, and circulated banned books by Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger. Her daughter Tana, born in 1939, was placed in a Jewish orphanage and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942, where she was murdered. Mamlok herself was deported to the Riga Ghetto in occupied Latvia on January 13, 1942. Even there, according to testimony from Inge Berner — the sole survivor of her resistance group — Mamlok arranged for a contact in Berlin to send a cake with a miniature camera hidden inside to document persecution. In October 1944, she was transferred to the Stutthof concentration camp, where she died in December of that year at age 26. The square's previous namesake, Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, led Prussian forces at Leipzig in 1813 and Waterloo in 1815. Cultural researcher Alexandra Weltz-Rombach, who has worked with the historians' network "Gruppe Eva Mamlok," notes there is "no shortage of Blücher memorial sites" across Germany and suggests it is time to retire the Franco-German enmity embedded in such Prussian commemoration. The square also hosts Berlin's annual Carnival of Cultures, a multicultural street festival. Weltz-Rombach has been researching Mamlok's biography since a Stolperstein was laid in her memory in 2011. She has developed exhibitions, a podcast series with young Berliners, and workshops that take teenagers to the actual locations of Mamlok's resistance. The only known surviving photograph of Eva comes from the personal archive of Pieter Siemsen, her partner who emigrated to Argentina in 1937. The department store where she painted her slogan — the Tietz — was itself "Aryanized" by the Nazis and renamed Hertie. The renaming sits within a broader shift in German memory culture toward recognizing women's resistance, which Weltz-Rombach describes as "often of a more everyday nature, rather than planting bombs." A 2024 exhibition and a new database dedicated to female resistance fighters mark this expanding focus. Germany's largest public library, the Berlin Central and Regional Library, now stands on the newly named Eva-Mamlok-Platz — a coincidence Weltz-Rombach calls a fitting symbol, given that sharing banned books was among Mamlok's acts of defiance.
