Way of the Dead

The Georgen Parochial Friedhof IV in Friedrichshain

A granite grave monument in the Georgen Parochial IV Friedhof - due to time and weather, the names of the deceased are barely readable.

In the trendy Friedrichshain neighborhood along Boxhagener Straße, few visitors will notice the small yellow-brick church with a temporary sign that reads, simply, Alte Kapelle (Old Chapel). Fewer still will venture past that old chapel into the small graveyard behind it.

There you can find the Georgen Parochial Friedhof IV, a Protestant community cemetery that dates to the early 19th century. Then, the area around Boxhagener Platz was known as Friedrichsberg and Boxhagener Straße was a simple dirt road that led to the manor estate of Boxhagen-Rummelsburg in the south.

Unlike other large European cities such as Vienna and Paris, Berlin has very few large municipal cemeteries. There are two reasons for that.

First, for most of its history, Berlin was not a large municipality. Prior to the Greater Berlin Act of 1920, the districts outside of Mitte were inde…