Berlin Cemeteries: How to Pick the One That Fits Your Day

Somebody in a hostel kitchen tells you that Berlin's cemeteries are the best thing in the city, and they are not wrong. Then you look them up and the plan falls apart. One is a lawn in Mitte with almost nothing left standing. One is forty hectares of forest out past the tram terminus. One shuts at four in the afternoon in winter and one is closed every Saturday. They are not a single attraction with a single opening time, and treating them as one is how people end up standing at a locked gate in Weißensee at half past five.

I walk past two of these every week. Here is what is actually inside each one, how long it really takes to get there from Alexanderplatz, and which one fits the afternoon you have.

How Berlin cemeteries ended up holding this much history

Most cities keep their history in museums. Berlin lost so many of its buildings that a lot of it ended up in the ground instead, and then the twentieth century went to work on the ground too.

Three things happened here that did not happen in Paris or Vienna. In 1943 the Gestapo ordered the destruction of the city's oldest Jewish cemetery and had anti-tank trenches dug across it. In 1961 the Berlin Wall was built directly through a Prussian military cemetery and more than nine graves in ten were cleared for the death strip. And in Weißensee, out beyond the ring, a Jewish cemetery of nearly 116,000 graves came through the Nazi period substantially intact, which is close to unique in Europe.

So a cemetery visit here is not a quiet walk with some famous names attached. It is the most direct look you get at what the city did to itself, and it fills in a lot of what the surviving Third Reich sites in Berlin leave unsaid.

The one you can reach on foot: Große Hamburger Straße

This is the closest thing Berlin has to an open wound, and it is an eleven minute walk from Alexanderplatz.

The Alter Jüdischer Friedhof on Große Hamburger Straße opened in 1672 and was Berlin's first Jewish cemetery. Somewhere between 3,000 and 12,000 people were buried here before it closed in 1827. In 1943 the Gestapo had the graves destroyed and trenches cut through the ground, using the broken headstones as fill.

What is there now is a lawn, a low wall, a handful of recovered stones set along one edge, and a replica of Moses Mendelssohn's gravestone placed in 1990 roughly where the original stood. Mendelssohn is the philosopher whose thinking opened German Jewish life to the Enlightenment, and his grave marker is a copy because the original does not exist any more. That gap is the point of the visit.

• No gate and no ticket. It is open ground, free, and you can walk in whenever you like. Go in daylight.

• Will Lammert's sculpture of Jewish victims of fascism stands near the entrance, on the site of the Jewish old people's home the Gestapo used as a deportation collection point.

• The Anne Frank Zentrum and the Museum Otto Weidt's Workshop for the Blind are on the same short street, so half an hour here becomes a proper hour without going anywhere.

Große Hamburger Straße today. The Gestapo had the graves destroyed in 1943, so the ground you walk on is the memorial.

If you have just finished a walk around Mitte, this is the one to add. It is a five minute walk north from Hackescher Markt, which is where my walking tour ends.

The short trip with the famous names: Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof

Take the S-Bahn one stop to Friedrichstraße, then the U6 north to Naturkundemuseum, then walk four minutes up Chausseestraße. About sixteen minutes door to gate, and it buys you the densest hour of cultural history you can walk in this city.

Hegel and Fichte are buried a few metres apart. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Johann Gottfried Schadow and Christian Daniel Rauch are all here, which means the men who designed and carved a large part of the city centre are in one small green rectangle. Heinrich Mann, Anna Seghers, Herbert Marcuse and Johannes Rau are here. So is Ernst Litfaß, who invented the fat cylindrical advertising columns you have been walking past all week without knowing they have an inventor.

And then, near the front, two plain field stones with nothing on them but names: Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel. After the monuments and the marble, the flatness of those two stones does a lot of work.

Two rough stones, two names, no dates. The flat Brecht and Weigel lived in is at Chausseestraße 125, immediately next to the cemetery wall.

The Brecht-Weigel Museum sits at Chausseestraße 125, right at the cemetery entrance, so the flat where he wrote and the grave he is in are the same stop. You can only go in on a guided tour and groups are capped at eight, so book ahead by email if you want the inside as well as the grave. Two more cemeteries share the same block, the First French Cemetery of the Huguenot community and St Hedwig's. You can see three burial grounds from different centuries without crossing a road.

Opening times move with the month. The gate opens at 08:00 all year. It closes at 16:00 in January and December, and at 20:00 from May to August. The shoulder months sit between the two, so check before a late afternoon visit in October.

Where the Wall ran through the graves: Invalidenfriedhof

The Invalidenfriedhof was founded in 1748 for Prussian soldiers, and on 13 August 1961 it had about 3,000 graves. Then the Berlin Wall was built along the Berlin-Spandau Ship Canal, and the cemetery was inside the border zone.

More than 90 percent of the graves were cleared to make room for the death strip, the guard towers, the control strip, the dog run and the patrol road. Walk in today and the first thing you notice is how empty it is. That emptiness is not neglect. It is the shape of the border.

What survived includes the tomb of General Gerhard von Scharnhorst, designed by Schinkel and sculpted by Rauch in 1834, which is genuinely one of the finest pieces of monument sculpture in Berlin. A stretch of the actual border wall still stands along the canal side, and the Berlin Wall Trail runs past it.

The border installations still standing inside the cemetery. Everything flat and empty beside them used to be graves.

• Enter from the Scharnhorststraße gate. The canal side is the wall, not the way in.

• Opening hours are simpler here than at the other sites: 07:00 to 19:00 from April to September, 09:00 to 16:00 from October to March, every day.

• It pairs naturally with the Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Straße, two U6 stops further north, and it is one of the quieter stops on the Berlin Wall Trail. If the Wall is the reason you came to Berlin, do these two together and skip the souvenir stretch at Checkpoint Charlie.

The one that needs a whole afternoon: Weißensee

Tram M4 from Alexanderplatz/Memhardstraße runs straight to Albertinenstraße with no changes, about seventeen minutes, and then it is a seven minute walk. Twenty-four minutes door to gate for the largest preserved Jewish cemetery in Europe.

Forty hectares. Nearly 116,000 graves. Founded in 1880 because the older cemetery on Schönhauser Allee had run out of room. Hugo Licht's mourning hall from 1880 still stands at the entrance.

The thing that makes Weißensee different from every other Jewish site in Berlin is that it is not a memorial to an absence. It survived. You are walking through an unbroken record of a community: merchant dynasties, art nouveau mausoleums the size of small chapels, the publisher Samuel Fischer, the publisher Rudolf Mosse, the painter Lesser Ury. There is a memorial listing the concentration camps, a monument to the Jewish soldiers who died for Germany in the First World War, and a spot where 90 Torah scrolls desecrated during Kristallnacht in 1938 were buried.

One field of many at Weißensee. Nearly 116,000 graves across 40 hectares, which is why the map at the gate is not optional.

Three practical things, and none of them are optional:

• Men must cover their heads. Kippot are lent at the entrance, so you do not need to bring anything.

• It is closed all day Saturday for Shabbat, and on public holidays. That single rule catches more visitors than anything else on this page.

• Friday closing is early, at 14:30 all year. Monday to Thursday it runs to 17:00 from April to September and 16:00 from October to March, Sunday from 08:00.

Take the free map at the gate. Forty hectares of grid under old trees is genuinely large enough to lose an hour in, and I mean that as both a warning and a recommendation.

The friendly one, with a café: Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof

Schöneberg, roughly twenty-five minutes out, and the only one of the five where you can sit down with coffee and cake afterwards without leaving the grounds.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are buried side by side under two small plain stones that most visitors walk straight past looking for something grander. A few rows away is Rudolf Virchow, who worked out cellular pathology and then, being Berlin about it, also pushed through the sewer system that stopped the city dying of cholera. The Afro-German poet May Ayim is here. So is Rio Reiser, and his flat ground-level slab usually has photographs and flowers left on it by people who were not born when he was singing.

The site also holds a memorial to Claus von Stauffenberg and the other conspirators of 20 July 1944, and the denk mal positHIV memorial for people who died of AIDS.

Café Finovo is inside the cemetery. It sounds wrong written down and it works completely in person. Same seasonal closing pattern as Dorotheenstadt: 08:00 opening, 16:00 close in midwinter, 20:00 in high summer.

The main path in Schöneberg. The Grimm brothers are a short walk in from here, under two stones you could easily miss.

Berlin cemeteries and the closing times that catch people out

Every one of these five runs on a different clock, and this is where plans break. Put together, the rules look like this:

• Große Hamburger Straße has no gate at all. It is the only one you cannot get locked out of.

• Dorotheenstadt and St.-Matthäus move their closing time month by month, from 16:00 in deep winter to 20:00 in high summer. Both open at 08:00.

• Invalidenfriedhof has two settings and only two: 19:00 in summer, 16:00 in winter, from April and from October.

• Weißensee has the most rules and the earliest surprises: closed Saturday, closed on holidays, and shut at 14:30 every Friday of the year.

My advice: work backwards from the gate rather than forwards from your hotel. Decide what time the place you want closes, subtract the travel time in the tool above, and leave that much earlier. Weißensee especially wants at least ninety minutes inside, so leaving Alexanderplatz at 15:00 on a September Wednesday is already cutting it fine.

One more thing that is easy to miss: Berlin's public holidays close Weißensee, and Berlin has holidays other German states do not, such as 8 March. If your trip crosses one, check it against the Berlin public holiday list before you plan the journey out.

How I would actually fit one into a Berlin day

You do not need a cemetery day. You need one cemetery in a day that was going to happen anyway.

• If you are already in Mitte: Große Hamburger Straße, thirty to forty-five minutes, then Anne Frank Zentrum on the same street. Nothing else has to move.

• If your day is about the Wall: Invalidenfriedhof first, then walk or ride U6 two stops to Bernauer Straße. Half a day, and it makes far more sense of the border than Checkpoint Charlie does.

• If you want the names: Dorotheenstadt in the late morning, Brecht-Weigel house at the same address, then lunch back down Chausseestraße toward Oranienburger Tor.

• If you have a whole free afternoon and one thing you will remember: Weißensee. Any day except Saturday, early enough to get ninety minutes inside, and with nothing else attached to it.

My tour covers the medieval and imperial core around Alexanderplatz and ends at Hackescher Markt, which puts you a five minute walk from Große Hamburger Straße with the whole story of that street already explained. If you are pairing the two, do the walking tour first and the cemetery after. The order matters more than you would think, because that empty rectangle of grass on Große Hamburger Straße lands very differently once you know what used to stand around it.

Image credits

Source and licence details for the 6 photographs used in this article.

The mausoleum-lined main path at the Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee: Lukas Beck, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The open lawn of the Alter Jüdischer Friedhof on Große Hamburger Straße: Arne Müseler, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons.

The field stones marking the graves of Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel: W.pseudon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Surviving border fortifications inside the Invalidenfriedhof: Beek100, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Grave fields under the trees at the Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee: Lukas Beck, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The main path through the Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof in Schöneberg: Fridolin freudenfett, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.