Cemetery gates

Walking home from an appointment with the doctor, I took a detour through the Hoppenlaufriedhof, and no this is not a reflection on my state of mind after the consultation! [Sorry, didn't have the camera with me and the sun has now set. I'll fill in the gaps later this week.] This is the oldest surviving cemetery in Stuttgart, originally consecrated in 1622. It was at that time well outside the city walls, but is now part of the inner city. The first burial was fittingly that of the man who had donated the land; the last was in 1951.

Hoppenlau is not comparable to Père-Lachaise in size or artistic ambition, but it's still a nice place to spend a quiet moment. Most of the graves date from the 19th century, but many have suffered extensive weather damage. Some are recognizable as headstones only by the fact that they stand in a cemetery.

There appears to have been a fashion around 1845 for surmounting plain stone plinths with elaborate cast-iron crosses. Many of these were badly cast: the left arm has broken off about half of them, and others have broken free from the stone base.

It was common until the middle of the last century (don't you love saying that?) to state a person's profession on their headstone, to ensure that they continued to receive the respect that had been due them in life. Several generations of the Sanwald family are buried in the cemetery at Bihlplatz, and one can trace their increasing social standing in the professions: from brewer to brewmaster to brewery owner to "brewers to the King". The brewery still survives as part of the Hofbrau empire, they make a particularly fine Weizenbier (wheat beer).

I found a family group in Hoppenlau who were described as "Gastgeber zum Großfürst", which one could translate as "Host to [or for] the Grand Duke". I have no idea what this means, and have been unable to find an answer on the Internet. I would guess that the titleholder was the Master of the Duke's Partygiving.

There are very few flowers in Hoppenlau, compared to more modern cemeteries. I was about to wax poetic about how we do things differently now, the past is a foreign country, etc etc; but there may be a simple natural explanation: this is after all the middle of winter. I'll report back in a few months.

[For the younger generation: The title is the name of a song by The Smiths, a band your parents listened to when they were your age. Their peculiar appeal was the combination of cheerful dance-in-the-sunshine melodies with deeply unhappy lyrics. Try it, you might like it.]