Memorial of the Socialists, Central Cemetery Friedrichsfelde

On May 21, 1881, the "Municipal Cemetery for Berlin" in Friedrichsfelde was ceremonially inaugurated. The city of Berlin had acquired the 25-hectare site, which at that time still lay outside the city limits, as the inner-city cemeteries had reached the limits of their capacity to accommodate.

The Berlin city garden director Hermann Mächtig (1837-1909), a student of Peter Joseph Lenné, and the royal garden director Axel Fintelmann (1848-1907) oriented themselves with the arrangement of the cemetery to the Ohlsdorfer cemetery in Hamburg, which was opened in 1877 and designed as a landscape park.

The cemetery in Friedrichsfelde was open to "all confessions and social classes". Since the burial of Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826-1900), Friedrichsfelde developed into the preferred burial place of leading representatives of the workers' movement. Representatives of the founding generation of German social democracy and the trade union movement found their final resting place in the front section (for example Ignaz Auer, Paul Singer, Carl Legien, Theodor Leipart).

With the burial of Karl Liebknecht (1871-1919) and Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) as well as other victims of the political conflicts of January 1919, a memorial to the KPD and its supporters was created in the rear part of the cemetery. The revolutionary monument, designed by the later Bauhaus director Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and inaugurated in 1926, was one of the most important examples of modern monuments in architectural history. The Nazi regime had the site demolished in 1935 and the graves levelled. The site has been marked by a memorial stele since 1983.

The "Memorial of the Socialists", inaugurated in 1951, was created on the basis of several resolutions of the magistrate. The landscape architect Reinhold Lingner and the architects Richard Jenner and Hans Mucke were commissioned with the execution. Great influence on the design of the memorial took the President of the GDR Wilhelm Pieck, who reserved virtually all decisions.

Today, the cemetery covers 32 hectares. Its system of paths, the "Memorial of the Socialists" and many individual graves are protected monuments. As the final resting place of important personalities and representatives of contemporary history, the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery is a mirror of political events and intellectual and cultural currents of the 20th century.