Der alte Friedhof

Freiburg's Alter Friedhof (old cemetery) was dedicated in 1683; the last burial there was in 1872. Situated a short distance from the Altstadt, in Neustadt/Herdern, the Friedhof is frequented by visitors looking for a quiet, meditative place. The array of moss-covered gravestones is both beautiful and macabre: weeping angels, sleeping beauties, cherubs, wreaths, skulls.


The day after Christmas in 1999, during the wind storm Lothar, a large tree crashed down in the middle of the cemetery. Narrowly missing several gravestones (and probably crushing a few), the tree kept some roots in the ground; green leafy branches continue to grow out of the horizontal trunk. A plaque next to it quotes Job 14:7: "For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease."

This evening, Elias and I walked through the nearly pitch-black cemetery to its 18th-century chapel for a concert of early music. The highpoint was getting to see the inside of the usually locked chapel, with its pressed glass windows, paintings by Johann Christian Wentzinger, and little sculpted cherubs hovering over the alter. The pews, like those in so many Baroque churches here, were clearly designed as an earthly reminder of the painful torments of hell. The concert featured a soprano, Zink (cornett--an instrument that sounds a lot like a trumpet but has a body similar to a woodwind), viola da gamba, and small organ, and exposed me to hitherto unimagined variations in tuning systems.

Wandering through the cemetery earlier today, I finally found a tombstone I had searched for previously. A white marble column marks the grave of Bertha Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, nee Eissenhardt, wife of Felix Mendelssohn's son Carl. Carl was a historian who was appointed professor at the University of Freiburg in 1868; Bertha died in childbirth in 1870 at the age of 22.