A proposal in a small German town to rename a public day care center that is currently named after Anne Frank has become the center of a fraught national debate in the country about antisemitism. Germany has long engaged in palpable national soul searching about the responsibility to remember the past given the country’s own history, including specifically about Anne Frank herself. According to the report in the Volksstimme, the impetus to change the name had come from parents and day care employees, with the new name thought to be more child friendly. The story of Anne Frank was difficult for children to understand and “parents with a migrant background would often not know what to make of the name,” the newspaper reported, citing school authorities. The director of the school was quoted as saying the school wanted a name “without political background.”

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Persons: Anne Frank, Anne Frank’s, Frank, ” Locations: Tangerhütte, Berlin, Saxony, Anhalt, Germany, Israel, Gaza, Amsterdam, Bergen