Dorotheenstadt Cemetery
The largest mausoleum, that of Schinkel's pupil, the architect Friedrich Hitzig, was restored in 2007; it features frescos that are now almost unique in Berlin and that were in a critical state.
The cemetery contains a monument to resistance fighters killed by the Nazi regime: a tall cross rises above a stone block bearing the names of Klaus Bonhoeffer, Hans John, Richard Kuenzer, Carl Adolf Marks, Wilhelm zur Nieden, Friedrich Justus Perels, Rüdiger Schleicher and Hans Ludwig Sierks, who were involved in the 20 July 1944 assassination plot against Adolf Hitler and were executed by the SS in a nearby park on the night of 22/23 April.
The monument also commemorates Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, who were killed in concentration camps, and Justus Delbrück, who survived the war but died soon after in Russian captivity.
A small area surrounded by a low hedge is reserved for members of the nearby Berlin Academy of Arts, among others René Graetz, Anna Seghers, Erich Arendt and Lin Jaldati, a Jew who survived three concentration camps to make a successful career as a dancer and singer of Jewish songs.
Today the city of Berlin maintains a number of honorary graves for people who made distinguished contributions in politics and culture, including Günter Gaus, who headed the West German representative office in East Germany (located just on the other side of the cemetery wall) from 1974 to 1981; Herbert Marcuse, philosopher of the Frankfurt School who was born in Berlin but emigrated to the US in 1933 (2003); composer Hanns Eisler; Hans Mayer, a professor of literature who emigrated from East Germany in 1963 (2001); the playwright Heiner Müller (1995: a bird bath shaped like an ash tray adorns the notorious cigar smoker's grave); and Johannes Rau, the eighth president of West Germany, who expressly wished to be buried here (2007).
In his song Der Hugenottenfriedhof (1969) East German dissident singer Wolf Biermann, who lived nearby at Chausseestraße 131, mentions the adjacent cemetery and some of those who are buried in this one (Brecht, Weigel, Hegel, Eisler, Langhoff, Heartfield, Becher).
