At the Graves of the Ancestors

This afternoon Mama, my siblings and I went to the Jewish cemetery at the Schönhauser Allee (in Prenzlauer Berg) to attend the unveiling of the restored grave plot of our ancestors. Joseph Mendelssohn (1770-1848), the son of Moses Mendelssohn, was the founder of the Mendelssohn Bank; Henriette was his wife. Alexander (his son) and Marianne were my great-great-great-great grandparents.

It was a fine summery day, not too cold. When we stepped out of the U-Bahn station Senefelder Platz, the wall of the cemetery was already visible to the right. We entered by the small, old brick gateway. A man who resembled an agreeable Ehud Barak handed out black kippot to Gi., Ge., and J.; then we walked through to the wall at the back of the enclosure. The cemetery was incredibly picturesque: a sea of dark green ivy with clumps of fern, shaded over by thin, soaring leafy trees with vine-draped trunks and sun-illumined crowns. Everywhere there were tall, sombre, simple grave markers in solid black or crumblier, weathered grey stone. The Hebrew characters that were engraved in many of the grave markers had the mysterious, ancient effect of runes. It seemed as if the graveyard had been forgotten since the nineteenth century.

Soon we reached the crowd, a mass of long wintry coats and hats, that had gathered around the gravesite of the Mendelssohns, on a cobblestone path flecked with the lovely red and yellow and green leaves of a maple. Two police officers in olive-coloured uniforms stood on guard further down the path. A representative of Berlin's Landesdenkmalamt (government agency for the preservation of heritage sites) spoke in well-enunciated tones and dignified phraseology, which had a nice but stilted effect, of the considerable damage that had been done to the graveyard during World War II, and of the restoration efforts even under the East German regime. Then he listed the damage to the Mendelssohn graves, and the means by which it had been restored. At the end he thanked the Staatssekretär for starting the initiative, those who had worked on the restoration, etc.

Then a rabbi intoned prayers, singing softly in Hebrew and repeating the words without singing in German. A "choir invisible" sang to the accompaniment of an equally invisible small organ (or keyboard masquerading as an organ), with a few wrong notes; but the pathos was so effective that it seemed as if Joseph and Henriette, Alexander and Marianne Mendelssohn had died yesterday instead of over a hundred and twenty years ago. The rabbi also read out a poem. Then, or perhaps later, the four pink granite (?) grave markers were unveiled; in the cemetery wall behind it, a white marble plate bears, in freshly gilded letters, the name "Mendelssohn." Two or three people (grown-ups again! -- the children were very well-behaved) in the back of the crowd strode through the ivy on another grave to get a better view, which I found rather questionable.

The second round of prayer ended in the wish that prosperity and a long life might descend on those who were present, which I found rather nice. Then the ceremony came to a close, and two toddlers who had considerately kept silence during the prayer broke into a brief wail. After meeting briefly with Uncle Pu and K., we went off for a walk around the cemetery before going home. At a corner we instantly spotted the graves of the artist Max Liebermann, his wife, and his parents. But there were also countless "Cohn," "Schlesinger," "Meyer," etc., markers, inscribed with names and dates in German or Hebrew; the oldest ones I saw came from the 1870s. Some used the Jewish calendar, so there were a few fifty-sixth century graves, which I found amusingly futuristic. The Hebrew often looked very much like Mesopotamian cuneiform, which I find a visually fascinating script. Often, unfortunately, the tombstones were decrepit, toppled, or even wholly overgrown. One gravesite that particularly captured my imagination contained two grey-speckled white stone blocks that were decorated with carved leaves and a hollow, which held flowers then and translucent green weeds now. Near it a white headstone had fallen back against a tree; the bark has grown around it and swallowed the top, and formed ripply dark lines that looked like the trails of tears in the stone.

Close by there is a narrow brick shaft that drops into the ground, perhaps leading into an underground passage. It is covered with a grille; a sign affixed to it recounts that members of the resistance had hidden there in 1944, only to be found, hanged, and buried on the spot by the SS.

After this tour, we returned the kippot, left the graveyard, and went home.