Listeners to The Monday Podcast may remember that in an early episode we took a walk around the building sites in the area.  One of those has now received its name and is called “Lina-Himmelhuber-Strasse”.

I was unaware of this until I came across the name a few days ago and decided to look up where the street is.  My immediate questions was, “who was Lina Himmelhuber”?

The obvious place to start looking was in either Google or Wikipedia.  But whilst the latter does not currently have any entries about Frau Himmelhuber, Google at least provides a partial answer.

The town of Oberursel has decided that when naming any new streets priority will be given to “bekannte Frauenpersönlichkeiten” – famous women – who are connected with the town.  There appears to be a lack of such street names at present, and streets that have been named after famous women in the past have not necessarily had a local connection.

So now I know that she is someone connected to Oberursel, but that is all I know.

That is why I decided to contact the town hall (Rathaus) and ask.  The receptionist told me that this was not the first request for this information, and that she had read it somewhere.  But she could not find the answer in her documents.

She passed me on to the department for town development (Stadtentwicklung) who were also not able to answer the question.  They did, however, know someone who would be able to tell me and I now have their telephone number.

But they were not available this afternoon.  I will try and contact them another day, but maybe someone reading this can tell me instead?

Who was Lina Himmelhuber?