Cafe Togo (2018)

Café Togo looks at the efforts to change street names with colonial connotations in the so-called Afrikanisches Viertel (African Quarter) in Berlin-Wedding. According to Berlin's street law, every street named after a person honors that person. Petersallee, Lüderitzstraße, and Nachtigalplatz bear the names of persons whose biographies are tainted by the blood of the victims of German colonialism. According to the law, streets that do not correspond to today's understanding of democracy and human rights should be renamed. Café Togo follows the visions of the Black activist Abdel Amine Mohammed, who is working for a paradigm shift in the politics of state symbols: away from honoring colonial criminals, toward commemorating the victims and the resistance and freedom fighters of the German colonial regime. His goal: a multidimensional politics of memory within postcolonial perspectives. Abdel Amine Mohammed therefore wrote the story "With Colonial Love." It is this story, along with a reference to the NS propaganda film Carl Peters (1941), which narrates the founding of German East Africa, that forms the basis for Café Togo.