Germany: Has Anne Frank's Name Become Too Political?

 Uproar over daycare's plan to change name from Anne Frank Daycare Center

Anne Frank

Who could object to this?

The town of Tangerhuette in the German state of Sachsen-Anhalt is embroiled in a controversy that has attracted nationwide attention. A daycare center for children which has been named for decades after Anne Frank is attempting to change its name since some parents and school employees are advocating for the name change. Reasons given for this move are that Anne Frank's name has political implications and recent migrants do not identify with her.

Now that the issue has attracted nationwide attention, it appears that the city's administration is attempting to backtrack on this decision.

The below article from the German news outlet, NTV, is translated by Fousesquawk. Note that the video is not available. The reason stated is that it may be due to the viewer's location.

https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Kita-heisst-vorlaeufig-weiter-nach-Anne-Frank-article24512504.html
Tangerhuette backtracts
Daycare center is still named  for Anne Frank for the time beingNovember 6, 2023 12:32
In (the state of ) Sachsen-Anhalt, a daycare center wants to change its name because the name, Anne Frank has become too political. After widespread criticism, the city declares: "A decision at this time has not been made. The actual discussion should be "incorporated" into the plans.
A daycare center in the town of Tangerhuette in Sachsen-Anhalt is in the nationwide headlines after plans for a name change were made known. Currently, the kindergarten is named after Anne Frank, the Jewish girl who was murdered in 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and later became known worldwide through her diary. In the future, the daycare center was to be called "World Explorer", the Magdeburger Volkstimme (Magdeburg Peoples' Voice) reported over the weekend.
On Monday, the town of Tangerhuette announced that the decision on a name change "is not currently pending". According to the press release, the idea of a new name is part of a long renewal process. The discussion on this continues, "without any decision made at the time."
Mayor welcomes "new dynamic"
"Naturally, in the medium term, the current public discussion on the naming will be taken into account," the city continues. "Many constructive suggestions and proposals have been received by us, for which we are very grateful," said Tangerhuette's mayor, Andreas Brohm. "These will lend a new dynamic to the weighting process, which we welcome."
The Volkstimme had reported on the project after, as they write, a mother from Tangerhuette contacted the editorial staff. According to Volkstimme, since the beginning of the 1970s, the daycare center was named after Anne Frank. Her diary, written in Dutch, appeared shortly after the war, in Germany for the first time in 1950. The book was added to the UNESCO world document heritage list in 2009.Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt in 1929. Her parents fled from the Nazis with Anne and her sister to Amsterdam in 1934. After the occupation of the Netherlands by Germany, the family hid in a back house on Prinsengracht 263 - today the Anne Frank House is located there."We wanted something without political background"
According to the Anne Frank Center in the USA, more than 30 million copies of the diary have been sold worldwide. In Tangerhuette, however, it seems that the history of the girl is not so well known. According to the city administration, the wish for a name change came from parents and employees of the daycare center. Daycare leader Linda  Schichor told the Magedburger Volkstimme, the children's council of the facility has chosen a name that is child-friendly. The newspaper further writes: "The history of Anne Frank, according to the leader (Schichor) is hard to understand especially for small children. Parents with a migration background also cannot identify with the name.
The argument, "parents with a migrant background" sounds less plausible. According to the 2020 census, Sachsen-Anhalt is one of the federal states with the lowest number of people with a migration background. Daycare leader Schichor further said, according to Volkstimme" We wanted something without a political background."  At this time, there is a signature-gathering process for the new name among the parents. 
The project has met with wide criticism. Sachsen-Anhalt's Christian Democrat leader, Sven Schulze, tweeted that the CDU in the city council of Tangerhuette  was "obviously not in agreement' with a change of name of the daycare center. He hopes this is true for all the other city council members."
The chairman of the German-Israeli Society in Magdeburg, Tobias Krull, spoke, according to MDR (Central German Radio), of a false signal. Although the providers of the children's daycare facilities are fundamentally free in their decisions on name choices, they should be sensitive in such projects.