THE GHOST AT THE CEMETERY
Berlin Trivia Companion
Studying historic images is not unlike chasing ghosts. Suddenly, visual gaps you know from your daily walks fill in with silhouettes of long vanished buildings, with hazy outlines of those who occupied them or passed them each day just the way you could be walking past them now.
Sometimes you encounter other ghosts, too - which is especially exciting when it happens at a cemetery.
Here is one such specter from Berlin’s past: same burial ground, three different eras. All photos taken at the Friedhof der Märzgefallenen (Cemetery of the March Fallen) in Berlin-Friedrichshain, laid out as a graveyard for the fallen of the March Revolutions of 1848 and 70 years later used to bury 33 revolutionaries, soldiers and marines, fallen in November Revolution.
The first, coloured one, was made in December 1918 after the funeral of the 33 fallen. Two weeks later leaders of the Communist Party of Germany (the KPD), Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, would be brutally murdered by members of the far-right paramilitary troops quietly supported by Social-Democrats in charge of the new Weimar Republic.
Neither Luxemburg and Liebknecht, nor the Spartacists killed during the Spartacus Uprising which began on 5 January 1919 would be interred in Friedrichshain - the new republican government would not permit the burial. Instead, their their last resting places would be even further east, at the Central Cemetery in Friedrichsfelde (now part of Berlin-Lichtenberg).
Now the second photo, this time taken in 1932 by Georg Pahl, the Berlin photo-reporter of the time. It is March again and an annual commemoration of the dead takes place again.
The third photo was made 16 years later, in 1948 - in a completely different world under a new order which was to hold for decades to come. And when the memorial to the victims of the 1848 Revolution had been unveiled and the cemetery itself restored and renovated.
The 1948 memorial honours the dead of the 1848 March Revolution as well as the fallen of 1918. The inscription reads: “To the dead of 1848/1918. You yourselves erected your own monument. Nothing but a solemn warning speaks from this stone / That our people will never renounce what you died for – To be united and to be free.” In the background one of the nineteenth-century buildings of the Friedrichshain Hospital (Krankenhaus am Friedrichshain is Berlin’s oldest public hospital) peeks out from behind the cemetery wall.
And the ghost in these three photos? Look at the gnarly tree. A true time-traveller - with a strong Sleepy Hollow vibe, too;-)
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