Bartholomew Cemetery
The Bartholomäusfriedhof in Göttingen is a historical cemetery that houses the graves of some important personalities from culture and science, including Gottfried August Bürger and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg .
Location and general
The cemetery is located north of Göttingen's old town, between Weender Landstrasse and Maschmühlenweg, opposite the humanities center of the Georg-August University . The park, classified as a monument, has an area of around 18,200 m².
history
In the past, the Göttingen cemeteries were located directly at the churches in the city center. In the Age of Enlightenment this was considered unsanitary and the burial sites were moved out of the city. In 1747, on the site of the former St.Bartholomäus Leprosenhospital outside the city walls, the “New Cemetery” was built. Initially, this was regarded as a poor cemetery. In the years that followed, however, prominent and well-off people were buried there, especially members of the university. This is how some magnificent tombs were built. In 1840 the cemetery had to be expanded and got its current size. Due to the increasing development outside the city gates, the area around the Bartholomäusfriedhof was also settled and prevented further expansion. With the opening of the new city cemetery in 1881, the Bartholomäusfriedhof was replaced as a burial place and closed two years later.
State of preservation
The slow decline of the cemetery began shortly after it was closed in 1883. In 1944, part of the area was damaged in an air raid on Maschmühlenweg. At the end of the war, the cemetery still had 420 graves. The real decline happened in the second half of the 20th century. Decades of neglect have left the monuments in the cemetery in a deplorable state in which they are mostly still. A large part of the inscriptions can no longer be read, many tombs, some of important people, were destroyed, so that when a new inventory was made at the beginning of the 21st century, only 185 preserved tombs could be counted. The renovation of the most important resting places did not begin until 2005, but the rest of them are still falling into disrepair. In 2017, restoration work was carried out on some gravestones to counteract their deterioration.
Personalities
The following well-known personalities were buried in the Bartholomäusfriedhof:
- Georg Heinrich Ayrer , lawyer
- Gottfried August Bürger , poet
- Alfred Clebsch , mathematician
- Justus Friedrich Danckwerts , publisher
- Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet , mathematician
- Rebecka Dirichlet , sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy , wife of PGL Dirichlet
- Adolf Ellissen , politician, philologist and literary historian
- Heinrich Ewald , theologian and orientalist
- Christian Gottlob Heyne , antiquarian and classical philologist
- Abraham Gotthelf Kästner , mathematician and poet
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg , writer, mathematician and physicist
- Friedrich Mühlenbruch , private lawyer
- Gottlieb Jakob Planck , Protestant theologian and church historian
- August Gottlieb Richter , surgeon and author
- Members of the Ruprecht family, owners of the Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht publishing house
- Friedrich Stromeyer , chemist
- Friedrich Wilhelm Unger , lawyer and art historian
See also
Web links
- Cemetery of the poor and professors (article in the Göttinger Tageblatt of May 28, 2011)
Coordinates: 51 ° 32 ′ 27.5 " N , 9 ° 55 ′ 54.5" E