In 2025, the Fördergesellschaft für den Alten Friedhof Bonn e.V. (Friends of Bonn’s Old Cemetery Association) will celebrate its 50th anniversary. The Bonn Greeters would like to offer their heartfelt congratulations! Through its work, the association makes an important contribution to the preservation and maintenance of one of Bonn’s most significant historical landmarks.
The so-called ‘Old Cemetery’ is easy to overlook. It is surrounded by walls and squeezed between three main roads and the railway line. Its entrance is at the beginning of Bornheimer Straße, almost directly next to the town hall. When you walk through the gate you enter another world. Graves from times long past lie in the shade of tall trees. Weathered gravestones and rusted wrought-iron crosses dominate the scene. Some are crooked. Many of the graves are obviously no longer maintained and are overgrown. The traffic noise fades into the background and birdsong dominates. It is no wonder that feature films are occasionally shot here. Fog machines are turned on and eerie figures stride through the night. The rattling of the railway is naturally muffled.
The cemetery has been in existence since 1715. At that time, it was located just outside the city fortifications. It owes its triangular layout to the fork in the road where Elector Joseph Clemens – better known as the builder of Bonn City Palace, now the university – had it laid out. It was originally intended for soldiers, strangers and poor people, i.e. those whose families did not have graves in the inner-city cemeteries. In 1787, it became the city’s only cemetery: Elector Max Franz closed the parish cemeteries and turned it into a ‘general burial ground’. The reason for this was the realisation that the overcrowded churchyards posed a health risk to the city’s population. In this respect, Bonn was ahead of its time. In most other cities in the Rhineland, such measures were only ordered during French rule after 1794.
The Old Cemetery retained its function as ‘the’ Bonn cemetery until its closure in 1884. From then on, burials were only permitted if the family already had a grave on the site, as there was no more room for expansion. The cemetery was surrounded by buildings on all sides.
An information board at the entrance, as well as the Fördergesellschaft’s website, offer maps and a detailed overview of the VIP tombstones . There is much more to discover than the graves of Beethoven’s mother, Clara and Robert Schumann, Barthold Georg Niebuhr or Ernst Moritz Arndt, because the Old Cemetery reflects the history of bourgeois Bonn in the 19th century. In addition to the graves of well-known and lesser-known Bonn families, the resting places of university professors also play an important role. This part of the cemetery register reads like a “Who’s Who” of the German scholarly world of that time. Scattered across the grounds, we also find traces of the British colony, which was important for the social history of the city. Somewhat hidden away are the graves of French soldiers from the war of 1870/71. Added to this is the art-historical dimension. A tour of the cemetery is always a journey through the representative funeral culture of the 19th century. Particularly important are the cemetery chapel – built in the 13th century as the chapel of the Teutonic Order in Ramersdorf and moved here in the 1840s as an early example of monument preservation – and the former market cross of the medieval market in Dietkirchen in the north of Bonn.
Another treasure of the Old Cemetery is its trees, some of which date back to the 19th century. This is where problems become apparent: in some places, monument preservation and nature conservation compete with each other, as the tree roots threaten historic graves. Nowhere is this more evident than at the grave of Ernst Moritz Arndt, where the oak tree he planted himself almost 200 years ago is in the process of overturning the gravestones.
Another problem is that the majority of the graves are no longer in use. The families have died out or now bury their members elsewhere. This means that time has practically stood still. This is a major challenge for the city, because although it can preserve the site as a whole, it does not have the resources to maintain the countless unused graves, let alone preserve the gravestones, apart from the graves of honour. On the other hand, ‘clearing’ the graves after the burial periods have expired, as is customary in normal cemeteries, is not an option due to the historical significance of the site and the existing monument protection. The support association helps to solve this dilemma. Among other things, it is responsible for the restoration of graves of historical or art-historical significance.
Another option is the ‘grave sponsorships’ arranged by the support association. In this case, the sponsors take over the maintenance of an abandoned grave, including the restoration of the gravestone, and thus acquire the right from the city of Bonn to be buried in this grave sometime in the future. Not everyone may like the idea of lying under someone else’s gravestone and being limited to a modest stone cushion with their own name on it. And some people also consider it morbid for someone to maintain their own grave during their lifetime. However, my wife and I find it somehow reassuring to know where we will end up – if nothing else comes in between.
