Ostenfriedhof Dortmund

 Sometimes i get asked how i manage to find the Cemeteries that are shown in this blog. Some of these Cemeteries are so famous that further research about them is redundant (Like Highgate in London: It's clear that it is a good one. Or Pere la Chaise in Paris: Another obvious one.).

Every single Cemetery in Italy is worth a visit as long the belonging city is bigger than 30.000 people. That's a fact. The cemetery in Verona (population 264.000) is far more spectacular than the Cemetery in Hamburg (population 1.800.000) which has the biggest Parklike Cemetery in the world. But a big park does not make a great cemetery. It's (at least that's what i'm after) the statues and the sculptures. The Angels. The beauty. It's not the amount of Rhododendron.

But why the Ostenfriedhof Dortmund? Well, we were invited to attend a party in Dortmund anyway so i took the opportunity to visit a cemetery there as well.

First step is always Wikipedia. You'll get a decent list of cemeteries as long as the city you're planning to visit is big enough. Dortmund is fairly big (popolation ca. 580.000) so i was lucky this time and found the entry for the Ostenfriedhof Dortmund.  And since you always get coordinates for an entry like this you can check out the location on Google Earth. There you can find often pictures of the cemetery and get a feeling about the place. This time i was fairly confident that the Ostenfriedhof was worth a visit and i was quite right!

Sometimes the research about the visited Cemetery is not ended after the visit. This time i digged deeper than ususal and i learned a very interesting fact about this beautiful cemetery: Many sculptures there were made by Benno Elkan, a jewish artist born in Dortmund.

Sorry 'bout the massive amount of text this time, but i deemed it worthy...

The weather was a bit nasty, but raindrops are always rewarding...

Iron-wrought papaver. 

Wandelnde, 1904, Benno Elkan

Persephone, 1908, Benno Elkan

Persephone, 1908, Benno Elkan

Cimitero Monumentale Verona Part II

Since i'm very lazy and since i'm a bit lost for words today i'd like to show you just some pictures i've taken at the Cimitero Monumentale, Verona. 

Cimitero Monumentale Verona

This being my 100th post i have to deliver something special. And for that occasion we went to Italy again. 

Well, not really. We weren't there just to get my next post done, but since we we were there we visited two cemeteries there.

Today it's all about the Cimitero Monumentale Verona.

It is a cemetery just like any other in an medium-sized city in Italy and that means it is absolutely brilliant! Nothing is even close compared to italian cemeteries. Even the big ones i've seen (Berlin, Cologne, Lisboa) are nowhere near when it comes to that. 

I made enough pictures to get this blog going on for long.

Here's a taster:

Some head is missing...

Rust never sleeps.

Berlin Cemeteries: Stahnsdorf

This Summer we had a week in Berlin and since it was my birthday it was kind of a present for me to visit Berlin's largest Cemetery: Stahnsdorf.

It is the second biggest Cemetery in Germany (Hamburg Ohlsdorf is the biggest Park-Cemtery in the world) and it has a strange shabby charm. There are many spots where at first glance you don't notice that this is a cemetery rather than an ordinary wood.

This explained by the history of this cemetery:

It was built in 1908 and during the reign of Adolf Hitler something extraordinay happened: Fascist Germany wanted to redesign Berlin into a vast City named "Germania". And many cemeteries in the City of Berlin were in the way of the monumental (or just mental) planning.

So many graves were moved to the Stahnsdorf cemetery.

After WWII however this cemtery was suddenly on communist ground. And they couldn't be bothered with the preservation of some splendid captialist tombs. So for more than 4 decades everything began to decay (the tombs) and to grow (the woods).

We discovered a part of this cemetery on our own in the morning (after the rain had thankfully stopped) and then we took part at a guided tour for children. It turned out that this guided tour was brilliant! The guide was  very entertaining and still provided plenty of information. We entered several mausoleums and even some crypts with coffins in them!

For further information : Friends of Südwestkirchhof Stahnsdorf

Benches. Quite uncomfortable i presume...

 This is the Headstone of a famous engineer: Edmund Rumpler. An on further examination you'll see that it's not an Angel you see there: It's an Ikarus!

This is the next (and last) celebrity for today: F. W. Murnau. He actually died in Santa Barbara, CA and it took a while to get him back to Berlin because since he knew how to live he was absolutely broke when he died. Friends of him preserved his body and showed him around like an attraction to get the money together for the burial in Germany!

He was originally named Plumpe (as were his brothers) but he deemed this name too dull so he chose his name after a town in Bavaria.

His actual coffin. It's an iron one rather than wood. American custom i'm told.

The next one is a very interesting grave: This expressionistic piece of art is the first grave in the world made out of reinforced concrete, a very modern material at that time (1920)

The concrete Cathedral.

Got very lucky with the sun.

Cemetery Stöcken: Revisit

This is the last Post about my visit to Hannover. It will be fairly large because at the Stöcken Cemetery was the best weather that day and since it was the second time for me there i knew that ther'll be plenty of intersting or beautiful things to shoot...

So let's get straight to the pictures:

Entry and Chapel: Neogothic at it's best!

Back of the Chapel. 

Odd. 

Crazy texture of that sandstone. And not made for eternity  i guess....

How thick can someone get? Why vandalizing this? I'll never get used to things of that kind...