Pappelallee cemetery park

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Poplar Alley Cemetery
Pappelallee cemetery park
Information board cemetery Pappelallee
Poem by Adolf Harndt and the motto of the free religious community at the entrance to the cemetery park
Grave of Heinrich Roller

The Friedhofspark Pappelallee is a listed closed cemetery in the Helmholtzkiez of the Prenzlauer Berg district ( Pankow district ) of Berlin . It was created in 1847 by the German Catholic Community (later: Free Religious Community ) in Berlin.

history

On the park side, the cemetery gate is overwritten with the sentence:

Creates life here
well and beautiful,
there is no afterlife,
no resurrection.

The Berlin Free Religious Congregation (initially and until 1862 still “German Catholic Congregation”) was founded in 1845 by dissidents who turned their backs on the Roman Catholic Church in the Prussian capital as a demarcation from the existing Catholic Church. In 1848 she opened her own burial site on a 6000 m² site between Pappelallee and Lychener Straße, which she had received from the landowner Wilhelm Griebenow two years earlier. From 1893 only members of the community were buried here. In 1907 the community had a large hall built in Otto Trewendt's cemetery, which was used both as a mourning hall and for meetings. In 1920/21 the property at Pappelallee 15 was separated from the cemetery and a main building on the street side was built as an administration building and a rear building adjoining the celebration hall as a single and old people's home for the community. A morgue attached to the celebration hall in 1925 was demolished in 1989. In 1934 the National Socialists dissolved the Free Religious Community and confiscated its property; the cemetery was also nationalized in 1936 .

After the Second World War, the Prenzlauer Berg district belonged to East Berlin . In the GDR , the free religious community was not re-established, so the cemetery on Pappelallee became the municipal cemetery. The cemetery was still buried until 1969, and in 1970 the cemetery was finally closed, although the law allows it to be used until 1994. The former celebration hall has been used for gastronomy since 1946 under the name “Casino der Handwerker” and is now used as a stage for Ballhaus Ost . The burial site has been a listed building since 1977 .

After German reunification , the cemetery was transformed into a park between 1990 and 1995 . After restoration work on a total of 35 tombs that had been preserved until then, the cemetery was opened as a public “cemetery park” on March 24, 1995. The combination of historical evidence with public use was awarded the Gustav Meyer Prize in the same year . In 1998 the park and the real estate were transferred back to the municipality. The free religious community sold the houses on the property at Pappelallee 15 including the former celebration hall in 2010. In the eastern area of ​​the former cemetery, a playground was previously created by the district. In contrast to other public parks, the cemetery park is closed in the evening, as there have been occasional cases of vandalism on gravestones and other facilities in the park.

Former graves of important people

In the cemetery there are several tombstones of well-known personalities from the 19th century; They were also renewed and placed in the course of the redesign of the burial place. These are the graves of:

A plaque on the cemetery wall commemorates the founder of a Berlin original Christian community, the veterinarian and barricade hero from Alexanderplatz Friedrich Ludwig Urban (1806–1879).

See also

literature

  • Norbert Pech: On the history of the cemetery in Pappelallee until 1945. and Klaus Grosinski: From the cemetery to the cemetery park . in: Kulturamt Prenzlauer Berg (ed.): No afterlife is, no resurrection. Free Religious in Berlin's Cultural History. Book accompanying the exhibition of the same name in the Prenzlauer Berg Museum Berlin from July 7, 1998 to January 31, 1999, Berlin 1998
  • Christiane Baumann: The Poplar Cemetery in Prenzlauer Berg, A Little Berlin City History, Lukas Verlag, 2016, ISBN 978-3-86732-226-3 .

Web links

Commons : Friedhofspark Pappelallee  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 52 ° 32 ′ 35 "  N , 13 ° 24 ′ 56"  E