Part 2 of Lily Philipose’s guided tour through Berlin’s mighty Grunewald…

Und an deinen Ufern und an deinen Seen,/ Was, stille Havel, sahst all du geschehen?

Theodor Fontane, Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg.

In my last post on hiking in the Grunewald, I had left you at the Alte Liebe, the floating restaurant anchored on the Havel, at the meeting point of Postfenn and Havelchaussee. Picking up where we left off (from the bus stop Am Postfenn), you can set off again, finding more hiking trails through the Grunewald, and once again uncovering layers of its history: architectural, cultural and political.

Route 3: Havelchaussee – Friedhof der Namenlosen – S Bhf. Grunewald

From the bus stop Am Postfenn, continue the hike down the Havelchaussee, keeping the river on your right and the forest on your left. The stretch is particularly lovely in the late fall, when the path is strewn with leaves in various stages of colour change. Keep your eyes peeled for a wooden sign on the left, at the edge of the forest, which says “Försterei Saubucht”. Turn in here and follow the path to the forest cemetery (about 20 minutes).

The Friedhof Grunewald-Forst has an atmosphere unlike that of any other part of this forest. On the other side of the Havelchaussee, as you hike along the Haveluferweg, you get glimpses of slivers of sunlight on the water and you hear the faint splashes of oars or the fading call of a coxswain, but overall there is a velvety quiet. The only sound I heard was that of a woodpecker high up and a lone jogger crossing the path ahead was the only sign of human life I encountered.

The cemetery, which dates back to 1878/9, was originally the Friedhof der Namenlosen (Cemetery of the Nameless), and the oldest graves here are unmarked. In the nineteenth century, only those who had died by their own hand were buried here. In 1830, a church decree in Köln had stipulated that those who committed suicide could not be buried in a churchyard, a…