Dorotheenstadt cemetery
The Dorotheenstadt cemetery, officially the "Cemetery of the Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichswerder Parishes", is a landmarked Protestant burial ground located in the Berlin district of Mitte which dates to the late 18th century. The entrance to the 17,000 m2 plot is at 126 Chaussee Straße (next door to the Brecht House, where Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel spent their last years, at 125 Chaussee Straße). It is also directly adjacent to the French cemetery (also known as the cemetery of the Huguenots), established in 1780, and is sometimes confused with it.
In the second half of the 18th century, Berlin's population was growing and there was insufficient land for cemeteries because of pressure to build on vacant land and fear of epidemics. Prussian King Frederick II, "the Great", donated land outside the Oranienburg Gate of the Berlin Customs Wall for this purpose; 4 cemeteries were established, of which the French cemetery and the Dorotheenstadt cemetery survive. The Dorotheenstadt cemetery was established jointly by the two (Protestant) parishes in the early 1760s; burials began in 1770.
Although initially mostly the lower classes were buried in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery, because of its proximity to Berlin University (founded 1810, since 1949 Humboldt University) and several scholarly academies (sciences, arts, architecture, singing), many prominent figures who worked and in many cases lived in Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichswerder have found their last resting place here.
As the social standing of those buried in the cemetery rose, numerous famous 19th-century artists and architects designed grave markers. For example, Johann Gottfried Schadow designed monuments for his second wife and himself. An 1822 statuette of Schadow by his student Heinrich Kaehler was placed on Schadow's grave in 1851. In 1975, a 1909 marble replica of Schadow's 1821 statue of Martin Luther for the marketplace in Wittenberg was placed at the end of the main axis of the cemetery. (It had previously been in the nearby Dorotheenstadt church, which was destroyed in World War II.) The bust of the industrialist August Borsig was created by Christian Daniel Rauch.
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