In this article, the author discusses how the municipal authorities eliminate the names of all schools in eastern Berlin in 1990 to formalize the spontaneous purge of school identities. She added, that the renaming of primary and secondary schools at this historical juncture provides a unique vantage point for examining what the democratic turning point of 1989 meant to schools and neighborhood communities in practical terms. After having her comparative study, her research reveals that in both German Democratic Republic and in contemporary eastern Berlin, school policy on name conferral was not the result of a simple top-down, decision-making apparatus and instead relied heavily upon the initiative of personnel at the school level. While the examples in this essay are from, East Berlin, her conclusions point to the historical identity and cultural values promoted more generally in eastern German school districts under communism and after 1989. Oral history interviews inform this study along with documents from the German federal archives and school archives. (Contains 38 notes.)