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The Great Jewish Cemetery of Berlin (1985)

Before World War Two, Berlin ranked among the great cities of the world, and many images from this time are familiar to us: the grandeur of Unter den Linden, the cosmopolitan elegance of the Hotel Adlon, the brimming activitiy of Potsdamer Platz and Alexanderplatz; but there places were destroyed, surviving today only in photographs that scarcely represent their grand subjects. Nonetheless, there remains in Berlin today an artifact less familiar than the others, but no less evocative of Berlin's glorious pre-War years, in part because of the fact that it survived the War and then East/West politics relatively unscathed.

That relic is the great Jewish cemetery in Weissensee, now one of the suburbs of East Berlin. Founded in 1880, housing over 110,000 graves, this differs from other European Jewish cemeteries first in its immense size and then in his short history. In contrast, say, to the historic Jewish cemetery in Prague, Weissensee, as it is commonly called, has the graves of Berliners who lived after 1860, when German Jews received full civic equality; it thus contains Berliners from the period when Jews, though never more than five percent of the population, had a disproportionate presence and an unprecedented prosperity. No graveyard known to me, anywhere, that is quite so coherent in evoking an earlier culture.

You're probably going to need to get there on your own. It is unfortunate that Weissensee is rarely mentioned in the standard guidebooks to Berlin; no tour bus will take you there. Don't be surprised if Berliners both East and West are unfamiliar with the place. Having lived in Berlin, I sense that West Berliners don't know about it, because Weissensee is in the Eastern sector that they largely ignore. The Jewish community in West Berlin ignores Weissensee, because it founded its own cemetery in 1955 and would prefer to support burial there. The few East Berliners who know about Weissensee tend to regard it as "the last relic of the bourgeois age," which is to say pre-Communist Berlin. Furthermore, both Berlins were rebuilt--the West to be a contemporary Western city, the East to be a Communist city; and to each of them, Weissensee represents a past that, for different reasons, they are trying to forget. Regarding it as the epitome of not just Jewish Berlin but pre-War Berlin in general, I think of the place as "the old city" hidden within (and from) the newer cities.

Fortunately, Weissensee is only a few miles inside East Berlin and scarcely inaccessible, open as it is on all days except the Jewish sabbath (that extends from Friday at 2:00 pm. through all day Saturday). A westerner visiting East Berlin has the choice of entering through one of two "checkpoints", as they are called: The famous "Charlie" directly at the border is accessible by car or foot, while the Friedrichstrasse train station, well within East Berlin, is accessible only by subway or surface train. At either place, you should find a line of waiting taxis. As you'll be required to exchange 25 deutsche marks into 25 east marks simply to get into East Berlin, you won't waste more than 10 of them taxiing to the "Weissensee Judischer Friedhof." Should the cab driver not know where it is (and don’t be surprised if he doesn’t), advise him to go up Griefswalder Strasse which directly runs into Klement-Gottwald-Allee and then, as he runs beside the trolley island, to turn right onto Herbert-Baum-Strasse, which is right after Antonplatz. You can recognize this last location by a moviehouse named "Toni" after the platz on the lefthand side. The cemetery is three blocks down from Klement-Gottwald-Allee, at the dead end of Herbert-Baum-Strasse. Another reason for recognizing Antonplatz is that you'll want to return to it as the closest taxistand for the trip back to the checkpoint. As Russian is a more popular second-language than English, it might be wise to write on a card "Judischer Friedhof, Herbert-Baum-Strasse, Weissensee," and simply hand it to the driver who can then check his maps.

Just inside the entrance to Weissensee, to the right behind the office building, is the honor row, which is the best place to start. Here lie the graves of distinguished rabbis, educators, lawyers, writers, scientists, artists, musicians and community leaders--among them the composer Louis Lewandowski, the chemist Max Jaffe, the painter Lesser Ury, the philosopher Hermann Cohen, and Rabbi Leo Baeck. Just behind the honor row are the oldest stones, from the 1880s and the beginnings of Weissensee, which was founded because an earlier Jewish cemetery, one closer to the center of Berlin, was filling its available space and could not expand into adjacent property.

Most of the inscriptions of these gravestones are in German and only in German, for one theme made clear throughout this cemetery is that most of these Berlin Jews felt themselves to be very German, loyally German. Indeed, many of these stones identify a birthplace somewhere else, usually east of Berlin; for these Berliners wanted their descendants to feel grateful that their forebearers had gotten themselves to Berlin.

Proceed fifty yards further into the cemetery and you will see huge mausolea from the late nineteenth century--edifices that portray not only the wealth of some German Jews but the confidence that they must have felt in Berlin, leaving behind monuments that they thought their relatives would visit and honor, on plots that they must have imagined would include their children and grandchildren. In 1912, remember, the Jewish community of Berlin was the most affluent, the most emancipated, and culturally the most prominent in all Europe.

Many of the gravestones have empty spaces, themselves signifying the expectation that other relatives would later be buried there; these blanks thus become symbols of the subsequent absence of Jews not just from Weissensee but from Berlin. Under many inscriptions, such as that belonging to Rabbi Leo Baeck and his wife, there are fewer graves than names, signifying that someone actually died elsewhere--in Baeck's case in England; in another case, such as the mother of the famed writer Kurt Tucholsky, in a concentration camp.

Proceed further down the main path and you will eventually come to the walled section devoted to Jewish soldiers who fought in World War I. With a central monument at the head of rows of small stones, each with a name and a military rank, this resembles other World War I cemeteries throughout Germany, for one theme here too is how German they thought they were, even if they were Jewish. As Otto Friedrich wrote in Before the Deluge (1972), "When World War I began, the Jews expressed their sense of German nationalism by swarming into the army with an ardor as lemming-like as that of the gentiles. Some 100,000 Jews (one out of every six, including women and children) entered the German army. Of these, 80,000 served in front-line trenches, 35,000 were decorated for bravery, and 12,000 were killed." That historical experience is also represented in Weissensee.

Just outside this cemetery-within-a-cemetery is a stone commemorating the deaths of Russian-Jewish soldiers who died near Berlin during World War II. Since Weissensee belonged to the entire Jewish community, rather than to an individual congregation, as is more customary in America, that meant that Jews from elsewhere could also be buried there. Indeed, every member of Berlin's Jewish community was likewise entitled to burial in Weissensee. Those who chose not to do so were either members of an ultra-orthodox community, Adass Jisroel, who preferred a cemetery a kilometer farther out, or apostates who preferred interment in the public cemetery in the west of the city. The fact that nearly all Jews were buried there explains why Weissensee has come to represent the entire community.

Head to the left for a few hundred yards and you will enter a newer part of Weissensee, and turn left again and you will see stones whose entire lettering is not Roman but Hebraic. These belong to the more devout, largely "Ost-Juden," or eastern Jews, which is to say Yiddish-speaking immigrants mostly from Poland and Russia, who came to Berlin after the end of the nineteenth century. Hebraic lettering appears elsewhere in the cemetery on the backsides of stones whose fronts are in German. Usually in Hebrew, but sometimes in Yiddish, these inscriptions are often different from those in the front. For instance, someone named "Adolf" on the stone's face is "Avraham" in the Hebrew lettering on the backside. Extended quotations from the German bible on one side do not correspond to the Hebrew texts on the other, and so forth. Obviously, bilingual, bicultural stones like these speak of lives quite different from those stones entirely in German.

At the head of the cemetery, just inside the front gate, is a memorial to Jews murdered during 1933 and 1945. Installed by the East German government, as a tribute to its own anti-fascism, this monument actually misrepresents Weissensee, which is not about the Holocaust at all, but about the lively years preceding it. Even with respect to Nazi devastation, the most affecting artifact within the cemetery itself is not this slick memorial but a set of stones perhaps fifty feet directly behind the honor row, in an area where trees are spare. Here can be found the graves of married couples, most of them aged, who died on the same day, or nearby days, mostly on the eye of the so-called final deportations of late October, 1942. Reluctant to leave Berlin, unable to escape from the roundups, aware that deportation probably meant death, they sooner took their own lives. Of the more than two thousand Jews buried in Weissensee in that terrible year of 1942, 805 were officially classified as suicides.

One question often raised is how this cemetery managed to survive the Nazi destruction of synagogues and other Jewish edifices. In fact, both Weissensee and the Berlin Jewish hospital were kept running throughout the War, initially because the Nazis had to preserve the illusion of normal life within Berlin, but also perhaps because they were afraid, not unreasonably, of disturbing the ghosts. One way that anyone visiting Berlin knows that Weissensee escaped the Allied bombing of Berlin is the presence of tall trees, some of them majestic, as trees more than forty years old are rare in those precincts today.

Should you think you have relatives buried in Weissensee, come armed with their complete names and their dates of birth and death. Every morning is open the office that has an alphabetical card catalog of the names buried there. (These cards, some in exquisite nineteenth century handwriting, must be seen to be believed.) If the name is on one of these cards, the cemetery's secretary will give you a map of Weissensee, a floor plan so to speak, with the sections clearly marked. On that sheet of paper she will then write three numbers: one for the number of the gravestone within the total (over 110,000), the second for the "feld" or section, and the third for the row within that section. Or you can telephone in advance 365-3330 (area code 037-2) to ascertain approximate locations of graves.

Sometimes the stone has disappeared, more often it may be overgrown with foliage. Because the cemetery now has a staff of only a dozen people (in contrast to two hundred before), the gardners tend to take care of the paths, to the neglect of individual stones. That explains why many heirs around the world have made private contracts for the caring of individual stones and the regular laying of flowers. Another good reason to get a copy of this map is in case you get lost just before closing, as I once did, it would tell you the quickest way at out. Remember as well that Weissensee opens at 8:00 a.m. every morning and closes 6:00 pm from May through September; at 5:00 pm. in March, April and October; at 4:00 pm. between November and February; and at 2:00 p.m. every Friday, honoring the Jewish Sabbath around the year.

You should allow at least a hour to visit this lost world; to experience fully the life gathered there, a second hour might be desirable. I have spent whole afternoons wandering among its folk, appreciating the life and culture represented there. Should you need refreshment, don't expect to find anything within the cemetery itself. If you didn't bring liquids with you, go two or three blocks back down Herbert-Baum-Strasse to the small grocery stores that can sell you East German sodas. At the other end of the street, directly on Klement-Gottwald-Allee, is a first-rate modest restaurant, Zum Thuringer, that specializes in Thuringian spicy meats (and also serves beer). The best dish is the mixed grill that the menu usually lists with a general name like "Spezialitat."

What I as a native New Yorker find represented in Weissensee is a city very much like my own--a magnet for immigrants from the east, for those who felt unwanted elsewhere, who came to appreciate their new city as a promised land, who displayed the confidence they felt in their new home by leaving behind monuments for their descendants. Thus, in Weissensee I see not only what New York must have been like around the same years, but what Berlin could have become. That these Berliners were wrong in their estimate of the place was, of course, a tragedy; but one question raised by the experience of Weissensee, especially for urban Jews, is whether they might be, even today, similarly wrong in their appraisal of other cities that seem as hospitable as Berlin must have been.

In the course of making a film about Weissensee, I have interviewed scores of Berliners. One who fully understood the cultural significance of the place was the noted American biologist Gunther Stent. Born in Berlin in 1924, exiled to America in 1938, now at professor at the University of California in Berkeley, he tells of spending his first academic sabbatical in southeast Asia, where he visited the famous ruins of Ankor Wat. Traveling from there to Europe, he visited Berlin and thus Weissensee, where his mother and grandparents were buried. Returning to the cemetery after many years away, he sees that trees have split his mother's grave and thinks that the place is coming to resemble Ankor Wat, a funerary city returning to Nature. As he tells it, he had the impression that he "was visiting the site of some lost civilization that had existed in some distant past, and that by looking at all these things probably that would be the way to reconstruct that civilization that is no more." When asked, as I often am, which Berlin I like best, East or West?" I reply that the Berlin I like most of all is the old city represented in Weissensee.