ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Antonio Gramsci's specific writings about street naming and more general ideas on hegemony to guide and inspire the study of power and street naming. As a young journalist in the late-1910s Gramsci even specifically criticized the 'evisceration of the old Turin' in honorific-odonymic terms, advocating instead for a street naming policy consistent with 'solidarity through memory'. Even if the quantitative emphasis in naming practices was on more readily recalled anti-Fascist struggles, different episodes in 'the people's history' were utilized as odonymic raw material to underscore the German Democratic Republic's (GDR) self-image as the culmination of the German people's 'national emancipation'. Whilst acknowledging the historical, administrative, and socio-cultural particularities of Berlin as a stage of socialist and post-socialist toponymic transformations, the chapter concludes by discussing the wider implications of Gramsci's work for the understanding of power in critical street naming studies.
