Jewish cemetery at Schönhauser Allee

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Cemetery C, partial view

The Jewish cemetery in Schönhauser Allee 23-25 ​​is located north of Senefelderplatz in the Prenzlauer Berg district ( Pankow district ) of Berlin. It was mainly used between 1827 and 1880. During this time the Jewish community went through significant political and cultural changes, which were also reflected in this cemetery.

prehistory

In larger cities, cemeteries were generally set up outside the gates . This is how the first large Jewish cemetery in Berlin was created in 1672 . It was founded immediately in front of the Spandauer Tor of the Berlin fortifications, on a site on today's Große Hamburger Straße. Soon, however, this burial place was enclosed by the rapidly growing Spandau suburb . A further outlying excise wall , at the gates of which customs were levied, formed the new city limits. In 1774, the health authorities also demanded that burials no longer be permitted within this wall. In paragraph 184 of the Prussian General Land Law , it was then decreed in 1794 that "no corpses should be buried in churches or inhabited areas". But it was not until 1817 and again in 1824 that the Prussian government issued urgent requests to the Jewish community of Berlin to close the old cemetery and propose a suitable site outside the city.

graveyard

Origin and appearance

General plan

In October 1824 the Jewish community bought a plot of around 5  hectares , almost ten times the size of the previous cemetery, from the dairy owner Wilhelm Gotthold Büttner for 5800 thalers . It was in front of the Schönhauser Tor of the excise wall on an old path to the village of Pankow , which, after it had been paved, was initially called Pankower Chaussee and since 1841 Schönhauser Allee . The new cemetery was laid out according to the plans of the town planning officer Friedrich Wilhelm Langerhans and on June 29, 1827 under Rabbi Jacob Joseph Oettinger with the burial of a Sara Meyer, née. Benda, inaugurated. On the cemetery grounds on Schönhauser Allee, a number of smaller classical cemetery buildings were built in 1827. Until 1880 all Jews who died in Berlin were buried in this new churchyard . In 1892 the Jewish community had a new mourning hall and an administration building built under property number 22 in the historicizing style of the late 19th century; the architect Johann Hoeniger supplied the designs . It was a "Jewish retirement home ". There were isolated burials in reserved areas until the 1970s. The cemetery with around 22,800 individual graves and 750 hereditary burials is the oldest recognizable Jewish burial place in Berlin, its predecessor is only preserved as a memorial and park. When around 1880, in view of the rapidly increasing population of Berlin, it became apparent that the area on Schönhauser Allee would not be sufficient, the Jewish cemetery in Weißensee was established , today the largest of its kind in Europe.

The cemetery area is divided by several main paths, one of which follows the course of the cemetery wall. Elaborately designed individual and family graves are located on these relatively wide paths. On the grave fields in between (A – L) there are mostly very simple grave monuments , some of them also graves, which are only marked by number stones, so that some of these areas still remind of the appearance of earlier Jewish cemeteries. The deceased who had rendered services to the Jewish community or to Judaism in general were buried in a row of honor. Deviating from the tradition of Orthodox Judaism , cremations were also possible in this cemetery as a result of internal Jewish reforms .

Graves

Wall grave

The profound changes in Jewish life in 19th-century Berlin left their mark on the cemetery on Schönhauser Allee. The social equality of the Jews progressed gradually. The Jews, for their part, were increasingly ready to culturally integrate into the society that surrounded them. The previously very uniform Jewish cemetery culture changed and in some respects adapted to the surroundings. There were no German inscriptions on Jewish gravestones in the 18th century. Now they first appeared on the reverse side, but soon also on the front side of the stones, where they replaced the traditional Hebrew scheme. In some cases one saw apparently Hebrew inscriptions - in fact, they were German texts, written in Hebrew letters. Often the Star of David was the only indication of the deceased's religious affiliation.

In the old Jewish cemetery there were hardly any differences between the individual tombs - they were almost the same shape and consisted of sandstone . Grave sites of very different looks were now being built on Schönhauser Allee. In many cases, they reflected the social position and material wealth of a person or a family. Granite and marble were used instead of sandstone . The wall graves along the cemetery wall were a completely new type. They were often made of plastered brickwork , with the family name on the back wall. In front of it, according to tradition, there was a separate stele for each deceased ; later, as in the case of the Beer / Meyerbeer family , name boards were also inserted in the back and side walls. These graves were not only an expression of an increased need for representation, but also a feeling of previously unknown security and sedentariness - they were laid out as hereditary burials for future generations too.

Some selected grave sites

In the department of L is the tomb Gerson of Bleichröder . The court banker, banker of the Prussian government and financial advisor Otto von Bismarck was the first non-baptized Jew in Prussia to be raised to the hereditary nobility. He had ordered a family mausoleum made of Carrara marble from the then busy sculptor Reinhold Begas , the cost of which Begas estimated at 75,000 marks, an extremely high sum. Finally, a much simpler, neo- baroque tomb with a high pedestal and richly decorated amphora was built .

The tomb for Salomon Haberland and his wife Olga in Section L is made entirely of marble and was created around 1920. The peculiar antique shape shows four Ionic columns in a frame, the one on the left with depictions of lizards and ferns, on the right with palm trees and birds and above is decorated with symbols of faith and palm branches. Haberland was a successful real estate agent who became known mainly for the development and development of the so-called Bavarian Quarter .

The painter Max Liebermann was buried in the free-standing hereditary funeral of his upper-class family near the south-eastern cemetery wall. The design for the L-shaped complex with neo- renaissance motifs came from the well-known architect Hans Grisebach . Liebermann was one of the first German painters to deal with the world of work. Since 1898 he was a member of the Academy of Arts and since 1920 its president. When the National Socialists took power in 1933, he resigned from office.

A special feature is the tomb of Sophie Loewe, a pyramid-shaped wall, built on the triangular surface of the Loewe family's hereditary burial at the confluence of the road near the cemetery wall in the field G. Ludwig Loewe , wealthy manufacturer and progressive politician, had it built for his wife, who died young to let. The portrait medallion of the deceased is even more unusual than the external shape of the tomb - a deliberate, emancipatory violation of the tradition of imagelessness in Jewish cemetery culture and the first example of this kind in Berlin.

  • Tomb of Lead Roeder

  • Haberland tomb

  • Liebermann tomb

  • Loewe tomb

The lawyer Hermann Makower was a lawyer for the House of Hohenzollern , a specialist book author and chairman of the assembly of representatives of the Jewish community in Berlin. The tombs of Makower and his wife are in section B. The two sarcophagi are made of marble, they are designed with concave curved walls and filigree decor in a historicizing style in the Rococo style.

The tomb of the merchant Moritz Manheimer and his wife Bertha in the south-west corner of the cemetery is a richly decorated hereditary burial, made of yellow bricks, a mixture of decorative elements from various historical styles: Romanesque , Renaissance, Mannerism and Classicism. The Manheimer couple founded and financed various social institutions in Berlin. The grave is in the immediate vicinity of the building that once housed the Jewish Community's 2nd pension fund, a retirement home whose building they donated in 1880.

The composer and general music director of the Royal Opera in Berlin, Giacomo Meyerbeer , originally Jacob Meyer Beer, is buried in the Beer family's hereditary funeral on the northern wall of the cemetery. The grave consists of a high back wall and two side wings, all of which are structured in a late Classicist style. Most of the memorial plaques are set into the walls, including those for Amalie Beer, the composer's mother, who ran one of the well-known Berlin salons of the 19th century. The marble plaque for Giacomo Meyerbeer is highlighted on the right on a base.

Three simple black granite stones of the same shape in section L mark the family grave of James Simon , his wife Agnes and their daughter Marie Luise, who died very young. Simon, a merchant and knowledgeable art collector, was one of the richest men in the capital of the empire at the turn of the century. He used large parts of his income for social purposes. He financed important excavations in the Middle East and left hundreds of his art treasures to the Berlin museums, including the portrait sculpture of Nefertiti .

  • Makower grave site

  • Manheimer's tomb

  • Meyerbeer's tomb

  • Simon grave site

War and vandalism

The entrance buildings from 1892, including the mourning hall, were destroyed in the Second World War. Some of the graves were also bombed or shelled. Inscriptions, decorations and grave bars made of metal were looted and melted down during the Nazi era. Towards the end of the war, splinter trenches were dug in the cemetery grounds and fortified with gravestones, other stones were removed from the graves and heaped on top of each other at random.

In 1988 over 100 tombstones were overturned by rampaging youths. Similar incidents of grave desecration were repeated, for example in 1997, when 28 gravestones, including some that had recently been restored , were knocked over and partially destroyed by strangers. The police let it be known that there was “ no evidence of an anti-Semitic act ”.

Lapidary

View into the lapidarium

During the extensive restoration work that was carried out on the cemetery after 1990, not all of the stones, some of which were badly weathered and damaged, could not be assigned to a specific grave. In order to still give them a worthy “place of preservation”, the lapidarium was built. The building was commissioned by the Jewish community in Berlin and the state monument office, built on the foundations of the war-torn funeral hall according to plans by the architects Ruth Golan and Kay Zareh and completed on June 10, 2005. The lapidarium (lat. Lapis = the stone) contains more than 60 tombstones from the 19th and early 20th centuries as well as display boards about Jewish cemetery culture and Jewish mourning rituals.

Memorial plaques

After the war ended in 1945, the cemetery was initially closed. The ruins of the destroyed buildings at the entrance were only removed in the 1950s. A memorial plaque on the cemetery wall has been warning since the 1970s: This Jewish cemetery was / in 1827 / handed over to its intended purpose / in the period from / 1933–1945 / it was / destroyed by the fascists / posterity should be kept as a / warning.

A memorial wall was erected in 1961 at the site of the destroyed mourning hall, which later had to give way to the new building of the lapidarium. In the new design, the old text can now be found on a wall right next to the entrance: Here you stand / silent / but / when you / turn / do not be silent.

In the northwest of the cemetery, a metal plaque commemorates unknown opponents of the war who tried in vain to hide on the site. The plaque is placed on the floor next to a barred shaft and bears the text: The death of others / not wanting / that was their death / here at the end of / 1944 opponents of the war hid / they were discovered by the SS / hanged on the trees / and buried here.

Gang of Jews

The "Judengang"

On the outside of the cemetery, between the south-eastern boundary wall and the courtyards of the adjoining buildings, the so-called "Judengang", sometimes referred to as "Judenweg" or "Kommunikation" , extends between Senefelderplatz and Kollwitzplatz . It is about seven meters wide and 400 meters long. Its current entrance is at Knaackstraße 41 on Kollwitzplatz and is only open for guided tours. The circumstances of its origin are not clearly proven. The sources mostly say that this path had to be laid to a back entrance of the cemetery because King Friedrich Wilhelm III . did not want to encounter a funeral procession on his trips to Schönhausen Palace on Schönhauser Allee. One reason for this side entrance is derived from the Halacha , the religious guideline of Judaism. The “Judengang” was redesigned as a garden monument in 2003, and is available to the immediate residents as a “semi-private green space”.

Graves of important personalities

(* = Honor grave of the state of Berlin)

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Jüdischer Friedhof Schönhauser Allee  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Schönhauser Allee 22-25 . In: Berliner Adreßbuch , 1880, part 2, p. 328. “Jüdischer Kirchhof”.
  2. ↑ Schönhauser Allee 22 . In: Berliner Adreßbuch , 1890, part 2, p. 414.
  3. ↑ Joachim G. Jacobs: Der Judengang, long forgotten and now restored ( memento from July 19, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) on berlin.de in December 2003

Coordinates: 52 ° 32 '4.8 "  N , 13 ° 24" 49.1 "  E