Turning over stones in East Berlin

HEAVEN underground is the best way to describe my experience of the 61st Berlinale, Berlin’s annual international film festival, which ended on February 20th. It all felt a bit like descending into a world of film and fantasy, of dim lights and flickering promises.
 
“In Heaven Underground” ("Im Himmel, Unter der Erde") is also the name of the film I enjoyed the most at the festival. Apparently I was not alone, as this documentary about the Jewish Cemetery in Weissensee ended up with an audience award in the Panorama festival section.
 
I have never been to this 130-year-old cemetery in East Berlin. Nor did I know that it is the biggest Jewish cemetery in Europe where funerals still take place. Britta Wauer, a young Berlin film director, has interviewed a number of people from all over the world who are descendants of Jews buried in this cemetery. Her subjects all travelled to the Weissensee cemetery, after reading a notice she placed in a newspaper for ex-Berliners called Aktuell (Ms Wauer expected 20 or 30 replies to the ad, but received 300 in the first two weeks). “In Heaven Underground” offers an array of funny and difficult stories about a remote and now all but abandoned place. Hidden behind walls in the middle of a housing estate in the outskirts of town, in an area covered with trees, rhododendron, ivy and lilac, this 40-hectare (about 100 acres) site looks like a fairy-tale forest. The cemetery houses some 115,000 grave sites, some of which look like small mausoleums.  

In the year following 1869, when German Jews were officially recognised as German citizens with equal rights, the Jewish community in Berlin grew to around 65,000. In the 1930s around 170,000 Jews lived in Berlin; a number that shrunk to 1,500 after the second world war. Somehow this cemetery, designed in 1870, wasn’t destroyed by the Nazis. The Jewish community in Berlin now numbers more than 12,000—the largest in Germany—80% of whom hail from the former Soviet Union. Now the cemetery has gravestones with Russian names in Cyrillic letters, and lots of flowers (though it is Jewish custom to leave stones). William Wolf, an octogenarian rabbi of German origin, has a good view of these mixing traditions, calling it “a captivating necropolis which reflects the change of times.”

In one interview, a man named Harry Kindermann describes the cemetery as a somewhat macabre playground in the late 1930s, when Jewish children could no longer play safely on the street. When he was 12 years old in 1939, his father, a bricklayer who worked at the cemetery, taught him how to drive on the cemetery’s grounds, which was tricky given the narrow paths.
 
Sebastian Schulz and his wife Susanne live in the flat on the top floor of the cemetery’s administration building. This is where Rabbi Martin Riesenburger, the cemetery’s rabbi from June 1943 until the end of the war, once lived. They explain that they don’t find living at a cemetery creepy. We meet Bernhard Epstein and his wife, who came all the way from Florida to visit his grandmother’s grave. This is one of the most affecting moments in the film. He cried when he stood by her grave for the first time, speaking to her in German: “Grandmother Helene, we have come to visit you. Sadly, grandpa can’t visit you, he was gassed in Auschwitz. Your middle son was also gassed in Auschwitz. Your elder son, my father, died on the Russian front. I only got to know your youngest son in Budapest.”
 
Ron Kohls, the current cemetery inspector, comes across almost like a museum’s director. He reveals a thorough registry with all of the names of the deceased, weighted with history and stories. What becomes clear by the end of this film is that the Weissensee Jewish Cemetery will soon have quite a few more visitors passing through.

 
"Im Himmel, unter der Erde" by Britta Wauer will be in cinemas in Germany from April 7th. “The Weissensee Jewish Cemetery, Moments in History” is a related book in German and English, published by be.bra verlag, Berlin