St. Johann Cemetery (Saarbrücken)
The St. Johann cemetery in Saarbrücken is the city's oldest cemetery.
location
The cemetery is in the Rotenbühl district . Scheidter Strasse borders the cemetery in the north, St. Ingberter Strasse in the east, and the railway line from Saarbrücken to Saargemünd in the south .
history
The cemetery was laid out in 1883 on the "Am Bruchhübel" site according to plans by Hugo Dihm. At that time it replaced the cemetery on Mügelsberg (today Echelmeyerpark ). In 1896/97 the cemetery was given a morgue and a guard house. The old consecration hall was expanded in 1908 and the previously 4.34 hectare site was expanded by 2 hectares to the northeast in the following years. When the area occupied by the inner-city Saarbrücken cemeteries became scarce in the 20th century, the city administration began building a new central cemetery in the south of Saarbrücken in 1914. The St. Johann cemetery was thus superfluous and closed in 1917. Only burials in existing family graves or already allocated but not yet occupied border graves were still allowed.
During the Second World War , the cemetery was stripped of its metal jewelry. Due to the metal requirements of the National Socialist armaments industry, many graves were "freed" from their metal splendor, and bombs also damaged the cemetery. In the post-war years, the cemetery was landscaped into a park and many graves were cleared. The cemetery was not reopened for urn burials until 1984 and new urn graves have been laid on the cleared fields since then. In 1988 the cemetery received a new mourning hall. Only the residents of the St. Johann district who still have an old right are buried in their bodies. All residents of the St. Johann and Eschberg districts are buried.
Historical meaning
The cemetery is an important example of the design of tombs in the 19th and 20th centuries. With its family graves with artistic sculptural jewelry, life-size stone figures and tower-like neo - Gothic epitaphs , it is largely a listed building.
Monuments
In the cemetery there is a memorial for the resistance fighter against National Socialism Willi Graf with an honorary grave. In addition, the art historian Karl Lohmeyer and the former Saarland Interior Minister and Saarbrücker Mayor Fritz Schuster have graves of honor here. There are also graves of soldiers, prisoners of war and forced labor from the Second World War and some tombs of German officers who fell in the Battle of Spichern on August 6, 1870. The grave of the conductor Karl Ristenpart is also located in the cemetery .
literature
- Rainer Knauf: Old cemetery in St. Johann . State capital Saarbrücken, 1992
Web links
- Website at the city of Saarbrücken
- St. Johann cemetery , memotransfront - sites of cross-border memory
Individual evidence
- ↑ List of monuments of the Saarland, Saarbrücken sub-monuments list (PDF; 653 kB), p. 55
Coordinates: 49 ° 14 ′ 16.6 ″ N , 7 ° 0 ′ 49.5 ″ E