Alter Friedhof

Alter Friedhof is a green park where gravestones stand among old trees, shaded paths and benches. For over a thousand years these four hectares served the Free Imperial City of Ulm as its burial ground. A church said to date from around 600 stood here until 1377, the forerunner of Ulm Minster. After the Reformation, the city allowed no other cemetery. Patrician families raised hereditary monuments there, in the more prestigious half.

The city closed the cemetery on the first of January 1899, and by 1945 it lay completely destroyed. The ground reopened as a public park in 1949. Between 2011 and 2015 the city repaired the brick walls, conserved the graves and planted new flower beds. Only about five per cent of the original gravestones survive, 145 stones in all. At the southwest corner stands the Protestant chapel of 1870, designed by Ferdinand Thrän, the minster's master builder, in neo-Romanesque style. Thirty-one stones from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries cluster at the chapel. The Pauluskirche rises beside the former Jewish section, a garrison church of 1908 to 1910 with two towers over fifty metres high. Fourteen Jewish headstones stand once more on the ground where the old Israelite graveyard lay.

Across the grounds runs a history trail whose forty plaques introduce the people buried here. Among them are Conrad Dietrich Magirus, Philipp Jakob Wieland, Ferdinand von Steinbeis and members of the Einstein family. The whole site counts as a cultural monument, walls and graves included. Some of the monuments carry family traditions that reach all the way back to the Middle Ages.