Berlin Trip : Berlin War Memorial (Sophienfriedhof – Sophien Cemetery)

Sophien Cemetery is still there and is a quiet and peaceful place where tens of thousands of people have been laid to rest.

Until the 1960s, all of this was also the cemetery, but it was inconveniently placed (from the East German perspective) where they wanted their lovely new wall to go. So, they decided to desecrate the graveyard and exhume the dead and move them elsewhere. The land was levelled and in 1985 they also demolished the cemetery’s chapel to create more space for their wall. The cemetery was the final resting place for many notable figures, including composers like Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach (the grandson of Johann Sebastian Bach), the piano maker Carl Bechstein and the founder of the Illuminati, Adam Weishaupt. The chapel that they later demolished was built in 1898 and it became known as ‘the Cemetery of the Composers’ because of the musical links.

There’s the new cemetery wall in the background and the East German fence in the foreground.

A bit more of the old cemetery wall in the centre and that bit to the right of it is the remains of an old tomb.

West Berliners weren’t allowed to visit the cemetery for a long time and those East Germans who were allowed to visit had to apply for a special Grave Pass to be given entrance. Those with family members in the part of the cemetery destroyed for the wall must have been particularly upset, but the whole arrangement really was just a little sub-optimal.