The Many Lives of Berlin’s Dorotheenstadt Cemetery

The Dorotheenstadt Cemetery in Berlin’s Mitte district is one of the city’s smallest and oldest burial grounds, but it has a long history of changing use and historic connections.

It’s still in use today, although with very limited space for new burials. If you weren’t looking for it, you’d easily miss it; it lies behind another cemetery whose surrounding wall faces a busy commercial street. In fact, I only found it because of a visit years ago to the next-door former home of Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel, who are both buried there, as is their daughter, the actress Barbara Brecht.

Originally, it was the cemetery for two Lutheran parishes, the Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichswerber, whose mainly poor and working class members were buried there. Next door, the Huguenoten cemetery belonged to a parish of French Protestant refugees. Over the years it’s seen several major population changes.

The cemetery was created in the 1760s on land granted by the Prussian King Frederick the Great. Berlin’s population was expanding and moving cemeteries outside the city meant more land for building. At the time, the site was a short distance outside Berlin’s tax-and-customs wall.

The founding of Berlin’s university in 1810 put a different class of residents nearby, and by mid-century the cemetery was a favored burial place for academics and artists, whose graves were more elaborate and often included sculpture. At left, above, Johann Gottfried Schadow, whose masterpiece is the massive quadriga atop the Brandenburg Gate. At right, a Schadow statue of Martin Luther originally made for the town square in Wittenberg.

The philosopher Hegel, who was an early influence on Karl Marx’s thinking and a mentor to many others is here, along with several other University notables, including the jurist Karl August Klenze.

After the 1860s, there were fewer burials in the cemetery for space reasons, and mostly limited to families that had already bought plots; the parishes started new cemeteries a distance away. But more change was on the way. The rising popularity of cremation eased space questions, and some older graves were abandoned and later reused.

In the mid-20th century, more change came to Dorotheenstadt, including the destruction of the church itself, and two mass graves in the cemetery for unidentified victims of bombing in April 1945. One is in the photo above.

Another collective grave, consecrated after the war, honors a group of anti-Nazis executed in a nearby park for their part in the attempt to assassinate Hitler in July, 1944, including Klaus Bonhoeffer, whose brother Dietrich Bonhoeffer is also honored there along with several others who were killed in Nazi camps.

Across from that memorial is a newer one: a grave containing microscopic remains of three hundred women executed by the Nazis; their bodies were turned over to a medical researcher so there would be no rallying point for resistance at a grave. In 2019, his descendants found boxes of tissue slides, and a long-delayed burial was arranged in the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery.

A number of graves bear a special plaque, noting them as ‘honor graves’ of Berlin. That’s a distinction given by the city Senate, reflecting important contribution to the city’s life, culture or history. It is granted for twenty years and can be renewed; it also makes the city responsible for maintenance if the family is unable to.

The post-war years found the Dorotheenstadt cemetery in East Berlin, and it became the final resting place for many German anti-fascist artists and writers who continued their work in Germany after the war. Brecht and Weigel were in familiar company, so to speak. Below, the grave of Hanns Eisler, a composer who worked with Brecht, and Erich Engel, who directed some of Brecht’s early plays.

Nearby is the grave of the novelist Heinrich Mann, exiled from Germany by the Nazis, and his wife Nelly. Among his best-known works is Professor Unrat, which became the basis of the film The Blue Angel with Marlene Dietrich. A little further along is the grave of Anna Seghers, author of the anti-fascist novel The Seventh Cross, which was also made into a movie.

The graves of Brecht and Weigel, Seghers and others reflect a trend, at least for a while, toward less formal stones. The grave of John Heartfield, who invented techniques in photomontage that were used to great effect to satirize the Nazis, is marked only by his name and his artistic signature.

Which is not to say that ponderous monumentality went entirely out of style; here is the grave of Lothar Bolz, long-time foreign minister of East Germany and his wife.

A number of recent burials have opted for minimalist stones that resemble a simple wall; in the first case below (ignoring all language issues) almost a pun.