Open grave

Early photography around 1880

Postcard from around 1900 with children marveling at the grave

The grave in 2014

The open grave (also: blown grave ) in Hanover is a tomb in the garden cemetery in Warmbüchenviertel near Aegidientorplatz and one of the landmarks of the city of Hanover.

history

The tomb is a hereditary burial of Henriette Juliane Caroline von Rüling (1756–1782), who died at a young age of consumption , the wife of the Hanoverian government secretary Georg Ernst von Rüling and daughter of the higher appeal judge Georg Wilhelm von Willich . It bears the inscription

"This forever bought funeral must never be opened."

Over the years, however, a birch that had grown out of between the base and the heavy gravestone and got bigger and bigger raised the stone and in this way "opened" the grave despite the requirement of the inscription.

As early as the 19th century, the grave was one of a series of open graves about which numerous horror stories were told as a curiosity . The grave was one of the early tourist attractions and developed into one of the landmarks of the city of Hanover in a broader sense.

The history of the tomb was the inspiration for the 1883 published novel The open grave of Otto Warbeck .

Around 1900 the open grave was a motif on numerous postcards . Karl Friedrich Wunder , son of the first Hanoverian photographer Friedrich Wunder , published a photograph of the grave in his illustrated book Hanover - 26 views based on artistic photographs , published around 1905 .

At the beginning of 2010, workers in the green column , representatives of the city's green space office, felled the entire tree without (prior) information or even public participation, allegedly “for safety reasons”, which subsequently led to multiple protests. In consultation with the monument office , an “appropriate restoration of the historical burial site” was announced. Then a young birch was planted right next to the tombstone.

See also

• Tomb of Heinrich Bernhard Röhr

literature

• Helmut Zimmermann : Hanoverian portraits. Life pictures from seven centuries , illustrated by Rainer Ossi Osswald, Harenberg, Hanover 1983, pp. 64–66
• Karin Vera Schmidt: Warmbüchenviertel: The old birch tree on the "open" grave is dead / The city felled the famous tree in the garden cemetery in Warmbüchenviertel. , online at Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung on January 28, 2010, last accessed on June 6, 2013
• Dirk Böttcher : Open grave. In: Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein (eds.) U. a .: City Lexicon Hanover . From the beginning to the present. Schlütersche, Hannover 2009, ISBN 978-3-89993-662-9 , p. 208.
• City of Hanover: The Garden Cemetery , free brochure from the Hanover Green Space Office in cooperation with the Hanover Press Office, December 1997, p. 22
  • or as a PDF document online (1.23 MB; PDF)
• Otto Warbeck: The open grave , Roman, Hanover: Schlütersche Druckerei , 1883

Web links

Commons : Geopenes Grab (Hannover)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Dirk Böttcher: Open grave (see literature)
2. ↑ see this photo
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Karin Vera Schmidt: Warmbüchenviertel: Old birch on the "open" grave is dead (see literature)
4. ↑ ^{a b c d} State capital Hanover: The garden cemetery (see literature)
5. ↑ see for example this photo from approx. 1880
6. ↑ Ludwig Hoerner : Friedrich Karl Wunder (1815-1893). Hanover's first photographer. In: Hannoversche Geschichtsblätter , New Series, Volume 39, 1985, pp. 261–295
7. ↑ Karl F. Wunder: Hanover - 26 views based on artistic photos , complete illustrated book, can be browsed online

Coordinates: 52 ° 22 ′ 10.1 ″  N , 9 ° 44 ′ 51.7 ″  E