Ilmenau cemetery

Kreuzkirche

Old celebration hall, today columbarium

Goethe fountain from 1932

The Ilmenau cemetery is the only cemetery in the core town of Ilmenau in the Ilm district ( Thuringia ). It is located in the north of the city between Erfurter Straße in the south and the Rottenbach valley in the north and is about 5 hectares in size. It is not a church, but a communal cemetery. In addition, almost all Ilmenau districts have their own cemeteries.

history

The cemetery has existed in its current location since 1633. Before that, the dead were buried in the immediate vicinity of the town church (St. Jakobus).

Investments

The cemetery is divided into a historical front part and a normal rear part. The graves of the actress Corona Schröter , the writer Friedrich Hofmann , the mountain councilor Johann Karl Wilhelm Voigt , the industrialist Gustav Richard Fischer and the politician Albert Pulvers as well as other well-known personalities are located in the historic cemetery . In addition, there are numerous ornate gravestones from the 18th century (mostly stone, richly decorated urns on a pedestal about one meter high).

The Kreuzkirche (also called the cemetery church) between the front and the rear cemetery section dates from 1852 and is completely slated . Today it is mainly used for funeral services, but also for other events (concerts etc.). A previous building had stood here since around 1630. In the period after the great city fire from 1752 to around 1760, it served as a room for normal church services in Ilmenau, as the St. Jakobus Church had been destroyed by the fire.

The old celebration hall next to the Kreuzkirche was built in 1836 in the classical style according to plans by the later mayor Johann Christian Hertzer and initially served as a mortuary, for funeral services and as an apartment for the gravedigger. The building was expanded several times, including a crematorium on the north side in 1922. Since the construction of the new funeral hall in 1982, the old celebration hall was no longer needed for funeral services. In 1991 the operation of the crematorium was also given up, and the annex was demolished in 1995. The demolition of the old celebration hall was also planned, but the building was secured from 1999 on the initiative of the local history association and the city council of Ilmenau and converted into a columbarium in 2011/12 .

In the cemetery there is also an honorary grove with a memorial stone for 78 Soviet, Polish and forced laborers of unknown nationality who had to work in factories and facilities in Ilmenau and the surrounding area during World War II and who mostly died of privation or abuse. There are also memorials to those who died in the Franco-German War in 1871, the First World War and the Second World War.

The cemetery is a stop on the Goethe hiking trail around Ilmenau. In the World Goethe Year 1932, the Goethe Fountain in the cemetery was inaugurated according to plans by the municipal construction engineer Eberhardt Stachura (1906–1986). The artistic decoration of the fountain with the depiction of a dead mother, over whom a person purified by death stands up, was created by the sculptor and Bauhaus student Wilhelm Löber (1903–1981). The decorative relief was considered degenerate art during the Nazi era and was temporarily covered with boards. Today it is one of the most important Bauhaus monuments in Thuringia.