1.
Before departing for Germany, I was anxious and endured sleepless nights of worry. Premonitions of doom haunted me, but I was unable to imagine exactly what that doom would be like.
Years ago, I sent a letter to a college professor whom I admired. This was Wolfgang Taraba, the man who conducted a graduate seminar in German lyric poetry that I attended. Professor Taraba was melancholy but charismatic with leonine head and a swarthy complexion. In his study, he had Nietzsche’s ghostly death mask displayed on his wall. At an end of the year party, he showed me pictures of his lost homeland, the flat plains of eastern Prussia now occupied by Poland or Russia. The photographs were in black-and-white, images of places that no one (except I suppose Professor Taraba) could even imagine in color: dour Romanesque churches, polders, sea shores hedged with small, wind-tortured brush, a lake in a bowl of hills and prehistoric dolmen in a pine forest. (As we paged through the picture-book, the pale mask of the dead man flared over my shoulder in the gloom like a torch.) Professor Taraba’s potato salad was made with fifty ingredients. He smoked a foul-smelling cigar in the seminar room, filling the place with blue haze. After the collapse of the old DDR, he traveled to East Germany to visit some of his old haunts. The letter I wrote to him was returned undeliverable. On his visit to Germany, something terrible had happened and he died. I don’t know if he is buried in Germany or Minnesota where he taught the poetry of Hoelderlin, Heine, and Gottfried Benn. Professor Taraba’s death burdened me. I supposed that I was now the age that he had been when he made his fatal trip to Germany.
The year before, when I traveled to Hamburg, I thought of going to see Ohlsdorf cemetery a few miles outside of the city center and harbor district. But Angelica and I had other things to do and the cemetery was a low priority and, so, we didn’t make the trip. On this visit to Hamburg, I would be in the city much longer and, so, I thought that I could make time to take the train to the outskirts to see the graveyard. In fact, when I tried to imagine myself in Hamburg in the weeks before boarding our flight to Germany, the only picture that I could conjure was a winding pathway under trees drizzling dead leaves down on my shoulders. Some graves the color of ground-mist stood among funereal pines. I saw myself from the rear, a classical Rueckenfigur of the kind painted by Caspar David Friedrich, trudging along ahead of myself in a sere, autumnal landscape. Every time I thought of Hamburg and my upcoming trip to that city, this image appeared in my minld’s eye.
2.
On the first full day that we were in Hamburg, Angelica and I walked across the park near our flat and, then, through the tumult in the Dammtor Bahnhof to the Stephansplatz subway station. We bought city transport tickets good for a month (79 euros a piece) and, armed with those Fahrkarte, took the blue line north to Ohlsdorf station. It was an easy trip, a straight shot with no transfers, and a good way to get acclimated to the Hamburg mass transit system.
The blue line runs through darkness underground for three or so stops. Then, the train traverses a brick-walled trench, open overhead with its walls overgrown by ivy and coarse, raw-looking brush, the sort of rank, tough flora that grows in gravel, sending spiny tendrils upward toward the top of the pit. This sort of landscape, tracks strewn with debris and broken glass, grimy weeds, and vines only partially veiling the colorful scrolls and swollen lettering of the graffiti on the walls, could be anywhere in the world – it’s the same vista in Philadelphia or near Newark or at the outskirts of Paris or Berlin.
After awhile in the roaring passage between the cracked brick walls, the train-line ascended up into the full light of day and ran along an iron trestle over a canal. The canal was one of the innumerable Fleet that crisscross watery Hamburg. Big villas tapped into the ruler-straight canal with small docks or stone steps descending through neo-classical bowers and little punts were moored in the water. Farther into the suburbs, the right-of-way was swarmed with tiny allotments where vegetable gardens were now overgrown or swamped in leaves, small sheds and huts with thatched roofs and a generally ruinous aspect huddled next to the protective dike of the train embankment.
Ohlsdorf Station is bright, with some pastry and bread kiosks on the platform between the rail lines and better restaurants below in a small shopping center with newstands and ice-cream places. It’s a busy station because trains running to the airport angle away from the superstructure built over the underground rail-line. (It’s confusing if you notice that here the U-Bahn or subway runs on the embankment on the surface, three stories above the S-Bahn or surface-rail that is here accessed underground.) A busy roadway runs parallel the train tracks, passing through a neighborhood where most of the shops have a mortuary theme: there are places where you can buy big wreathes, floral arrangements with bright red and yellow blossoms, caskets, and elaborate memorial stones inlaid with bronze or gilt letters. The cemetery is on the other side of the road, built among some low, rolling hills that are heavily wooded, and enclosed by a high iron fence. Among the trees, the steep gables of funeral chapels are visible at intervals hovering over the broad crowns of oaks and the spiked triangular spires of the evergreens and there is a strange, monumental building shaped like flattened pyramid at the edge of the park.
3.
Ohlsdorf Cemetery is the largest graveyard in the world. It encompasses more acreage than Central Park in New York City and, according to an informational sign, is nine times the size of Vatican City. Unlike Central Park, this city of the dead is mostly empty. When we walked its winding paths and looping ring roads, no one was there. Sometimes, in the distance, I saw an elderly couple, obviously power-walking as exercise, a cardio work-out among the tombs, and, in clearings, here and there, a solitary figure contemplated grave-markers, or sat silently on a bench beside carefully landscaped ponds, everything designed to seem natural, but, in fact, engineered to create that effect. The place wasn’t wild but mildly “wildish”; it wasn’t a wilderness or the forest primeval, although everything was contrived to present an effect of the studious, nonchalant disarray of unmanaged nature. (Is there today such a thing as unmanaged nature? Was there ever? At Yosemite, for instance, the Native Americans carefully pruned and cropped trees to enhance their acorn harvests and, periodically, they burnt away the underbrush.)
Near the entrance to the cemetery by the Ohlsdorf station – of course, there are other entrances by other train stops – a columbarium, chapel and crematorium are aligned along the roadway and fused together into a sort of austere clinker-brick shopping mall for death and its appurtenances. You can buy a ticket to watch a cremation – not every day but on some weekends, or tour an art exhibit, or buy burial plots in the adjacent forest. A small museum of funerary art stands apart from the complex. When I was at Ohsldorf, the museum was always shuttered, a couple of example of monuments showing different fashions in gravestones over the decades studded the lawn nearby. Across the lane, there’s one of Hamburg’s ubiquitous monuments to the victims of fascism, a towering wall pierced with innumerable alcoves that hold small bell-shaped urns. On the wall, these words are inscribed: Remember our Death / Remember our Suffering / Man is brother to Man / We died because of Injustice. You, the Living, recognize your Duty. The German word for “duty,” that is, Pflicht, is ominous. All organized murder is carried out in the name of duty. What would the world look like if people were taught to ignore duty or, even, to oppose its iron laws?
4.
At an information kiosk at Ohlsdorf station cemetery entrance, you can pick up a map of the park. The map depicts the location of major trails linking the roads that intersect among the trees as elongated loops. A dozen chapels are scattered across the grounds. These are modestly proportioned, graceful buildings in which services can be conducted for interments on the grounds nearby. The chapels have a rustic appearance, some of them with shingled sides, and, among the rhododendrons, they have a somewhat gloomy, dour aspect. The first couple chapels near the entrance are a few hundred yards away from the perimeter of the Friedhof and are easily reached. But, when I searched for more remote worship buildings, Angelic and I found ourselves confused by the curving trails that twist through the woods and, after a while, we just kept returning to same chapels that we had previously seen, hiking in circles without knowing it.
In the oldest part of the graveyard, close to the station entrance, a heavy ashlar embedded in grass among flower beds marks the grave of Philip Otto Runge, the great early Romantic painter. (His works occupy a room next to the Friedrich gallery at the Hamburg Kunsthalle.) Runge’s grave stands along a grassy promenade flanked by flowers with big blossoms still drooping over the wet lawn. On a low hillside, above the graves, a life-size Christ the Redeemer stands like a pillar of white smoke.
I’m looking for the grave of Hans Albers, the movie actor, buried, according to the map near Gustaf Gruendgens, also a director and actor. Someone named Jan Fedder is also interred in this general area, the grave marked prominently as an important attraction. I find the traffic circle in the forest where these graves are supposed to be located, but cardinal directions are reversed, it seems, in this city of the dead, and, although I know I am close to my destination, the granite headstones are hidden in thickets with slender, overgrown paths between them. In a clearing, a small classical temple with grey doric columns protects its cell of profound darkness. The day is lightless but the little temple-mausoleum shimmers as if slick with olive oil. We are disoriented and rambling here and there, among small burial tracts in the soaking forest where colonies of wet graves are located. A German-speaking group of visitors, led by a tourguide, crosses and re-crosses the still and empty lane. We hover nearby and, at last, find Albers’ grave, a big rough-hewn block of granite surrounded by bushes with surprisingly bright purple berries. The berries seem improbably livid, as if plastic of some kind, but touching them, I feel that they are real, organic and soft to the touch. Nearby, Fedder’s gravesite is baroque with a large granite cross with a full-size mourning figure cast in streaked dark bronze at its base. (The tomb looks ancient, but Fedder died recently: 2019.) The tour group pauses respectfully in front of Fedder’s pompous grave and people take pictures. A cast iron fence protects the burial plot under the big stark cross and there is a post-office box near the gate so that visitors can leave messages for the film and TV star. Fedder specialized in playing north German characters on the screen – he was in Wolfgang Peterson’s Das Boot and, later, became famous for playing a crude, gruff copper in the crimi, Grossstadtrevier. He is one of those figures very much beloved among Germans in Hamburg but entirely unknown to the rest of the world. (To some extent, the great actor Hans Albers shares a similar fate – Germans revere him for his work in The Blue Angel, Grosse Freiheit #7, and many other movies; he was also a singer, a bit like Frank Sinatra although, perhaps, with a more melancholy cast. He was renowned for his huge, shining eyes. But no one knows anything about him in the English-speaking world.)
I know that there is an impressive memorial to the victims of the aerial bombing raid on Hamburg in July 1943, Operation Gomorrha. (The firestorm which killed between 40,000 and 60,000 civilians disrupted the production of Grosse Freiheit #7, the Hans Albers’ melodrama directed by Helmut Kaeutner and the movie’s Hamburg locations had to be moved away from the ruined city to studios in Prague.) Locating myself on the map at the Albers’ grave, Angelica and I set out along the road to find the air raid graves. A light drizzle falls and its cool and I’m not really dressed well for the weather. We reach the next chapel on the lane, pause there to rest on a bus-stop bench for a few minutes and I examine the map. It seems that a trail leads beside a small chain of ponds in the direction of the bombing victims’ monument. But I can’t determine the scale or distance. The sculptor Gerhardt Marcks carved figures in a barrel-vault niche in a massive wall at the site. Charon, the boatman in Hades, glowers at the living who have come to the monument – his face is fierce and rather disconcertingly looks like the visage of a great ape, a gorilla or King Kong; the dead stand in a row on his low-slung, toboggan-shaped boat – they are like sad people waiting for the saddest bus in the world: a naked man squats with his head in his hands, a woman and two children stand stoically in the center of gondola, and another naked man, corpulent with a bald head faces in the direction of the gloomy shore to which they are being transported. (The name of the work is “The Crossing of the River Styx”.) The work exudes despair and, probably, is not something worth seeing in person, but I make the monument my destination and we set off along a path lined with mournful willow trees.
5.
We walk for a long way, pausing at intersections to study the map. A lagoon with stone crosses on its banks displays some big lily pads. Small clearings are occupied by little stony colonies of the dead. We take several turns in the path to approach the war victim’s monument. Somewhere in these glades, the British War Graves commission manages an acre of uniform stone slabs marked the resting place of English soldiers who perished at a POW camp on the Frisian Islands during World War One. Ahead of me, I see an old man with a white beard walking among the tombs. I follow in his footsteps. I can’t see his face, only his back and shoulders. After a half-hour, we glimpse a chapel that looks a bit like a rustic hunting lodge. Pushing through some shaggy shrubbery, we see that a lane runs along the front of the chapel and there is a bus stop. This is the same place from which we embarked forty minutes ago; we have just made a round loop through the graves. Then, it occurs to me that this place is truly huge and that we have explored only a tiny corner of the cemetery and that the war graves must be a mile away or more.
We’re footsore and so we limp back to the train station for a cinnamon roll (“Franzbrot”).
6.
My son, Martin, traveled to Germany and remained for a couple weeks. On one of the last days that he was in Hamburg, we took the blue line back to Ohlsdorf to see if we could locate the British Expeditionary Force cemetery and the monument to the air raid dead there. It had been raining intermittently and the station at the city of the dead was slick with brownish slush on the concrete platform and floors below. Trucks and cars churned through puddles of water at the intersections. The wreaths and bouquets at the florist’s shop seemed faded. More than two weeks had passed since my last visit to the cemetery, but it was not appreciably colder on this day, although the rain was more challenging. The remnants of flowers blossoming among the topiary by Runge’s grave were greyer and gave the impression of being ancient like horticultural specimens preserved in formaldehyde.
The map of the cemetery became increasingly sodden in my pocket and, at the folds, was illegible. We set off at a brisk pace, understanding that the park was immense and that it would take a long time to hike to those areas that interested us. For awhile, we walked along one of the lanes, but our destination was on the other side of the park and, so, we needed to follow paths through the woods to reach the other ring-road in the cemetery. We passed several chapels and, then, followed a trail toward the loop across the forest. A central roadway, bifurcating the cemetery, passed by a chapel surrounded by pines and shaped a bit like an oriental fantasy with a tile roof turned upward pagoda-style at the eaves below a faux-mosque copper dome. In a shell of reinforced and transparent plastic, a bench marked a bus-stop on a route that apparently looped around the cemetery. No bus was in sight and so we continued on a curving path guarded by bronze angels melted into sagging postures of grief, sometimes dense encampments of graves clustered together around still, silent fountains scummy with entrapped rainwater, in other places no graves at all, just old trees and undergrowth and, at the end of a sidewalk buried in brown leaves, a stone mausoleum with brass door and stained glass clasped in a gothic lead frame. Sometimes, I thought I saw an old man, ahead of us, shoulders hunched over a little as he paced through the forest.
Either the map was incorrect or I read it wrong. The curving trail didn’t run straight to the north loop road but came to a tee, dividing right and left in the middle of a groove of dark, wet pines. Some wood-framed bins of clippings and rotting flowers marked the place where the trail came to an end at this parting of the ways. I was turned-around and couldn’t figure out directions because there were no landmarks that I could correlate to the map. We turned right and walked in the drizzle for a half-hour before coming to a road. Next to the lane there was a chapel with curled pagoda eaves and a copper mosque-like dome. We sat at the bus-stop for a while.
In the distance, a bus approached. The vehicle slowed when the driver saw us sitting on the bench. I didn’t know where the bus was going and was afraid to venture onto it. Behind greenish glass, the shadowy bus driver nodded to us. A couple of shrouded figures with pale faces were sitting near the back of the bus. I gestured that we were not going to board and Martin and I backed away from the busstop. The vehicle slowed a little but, then, lumbered down the road.
We decided that there was no hope of ever finding the places for which we were searching and, so, we set off in the opposite direction to where I thought the entry by the train station was located. There seemed to be another U-Bahn stop on the other side of the cemetery. We walked for another half-hour, came upon a gate and found that we had come to the park entrance across the busy road from the train station with the connections to the airport. To get anywhere in this city of the dead, choose the direction that seems completely wrong and go that way – sooner or later, you will reach your goal since the only way to reach a place here seems to be go the way opposite to where you imagine that you should go.
7.
Near the Ohlsdorf station exit, the cemetery’s crematorium rears up over iron lances of perimeter fence and the busy road channeling traffic parallel to the park border. The crematorium is a ziggurat of grey-brown brick, the wedge-shaped tower flanked by a low mathematically symmetrical arcade of dark shadowy recesses, each brick on the right equivalent to a brick on the left. The structure seems Babylonian, neo-Assyrian, with some elongated grim-looking angels adorning the austere mass of brick wall below the pyramid of the tower. The steeply sloping s sides of the ziggurat are lined with bronze grooved panels with a pale-green patina.
The “New Ohlsdorf Crematorium” as it is known was designed by Hamburg’s leading architect, Fritz Schumacher. Beginning in 1906, Schumache, then, about forty was appointed to serve as Hamburg’s city planner and architect in charge of public projects. Born in Bogota, Columbia to parents of the mercantile class from Bremen, Schumacher was a leading exponent of what is called “Backsteinexpressionismus” – that is “brick expressionism” – and a number of his large, hulking buildings survive in Hamburg, particularly in the financial district by the harbor. Schumacher’s last commission was the crematorium at Ohlsdorf and its an impressively majestic edifice, eschewing classicism for a more monumental archaic Mesopotamian style. The structure is heavy, immobile, an expression of the enduring, humble, and, yet, formidable qualities of brick – you set one brick upon another and, then, another and you repeat the process until you have a mountain. The artificial peak of the crematorium is built with a summit of hatched brick laid vertically as opposed to the horizontal courses comprising the body of the ziggurat. These recessed box-like complications to the tower’s top cap the structure and give it’s surface an intricacy in which shadow and light might play to interesting effect if there were only any sunlight here. But, on the day I saw the crematorium, the sky was overcast and rainy and so the inlay on top of the pyramid read as a dull sequence of shallow cubby-holes.
Schumacher readily assimilated himself to the Nazi regime and won many prizes for his work. In 1944, the Nazis gave him the Goethe Prize for his distinguished work in architecture. He lived long enough (dying in 1946) to see his city smashed like crockery by Allied bombing.
Adjacent to the crematorium, another chapel-like space holds bronze urns, dark forms against an array of pale stained glass windows. Wan yellow light streams into the columbarium and the floors and walls are white so that the place seems bright and open. The cylinders full of ash and bone are curved like naked women. The air is heavily perfumed with the scent of flowers.
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