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It has an autumnal aspect, the cemetery, regardless of the season. Leaves fall, winter through summer. Ravens hop churlishly about the litter bins. The horizon has that half-surprised look; stillness! The scent of turned earth hangs on the air. There are bone-bare branches and cinnamon browns; crunching paths and unevenly rusted railings, blistering under black paint. Occasionally, a lost glove is to be found hanging from an ornamented railing spike, damp and forlorn. Night and day the silence is cracked by the desperate cacophony of sirens — ambulances and emergency doctors in ambulances on their way to and from Barmbek General Hospital. There is no music in it, only peril. * It was quite difficult to find a book about the cemetery, in spite of it being the biggest in the world. The author of a two-volume reference work in the city library had this to say about the statue of the bare-breasted woman: Fate (in folklore also known as the ‘Cruel Countess’). 1905, Hugo Lederer. Shell-limestone. Figure 200 cms; pedestal 20 cms. “H. Lederer 1905”. A group consisting of three persons. ‘Fate’ — a goddess with bared breasts and a flowing gown — drags a youth and a girl by their hair behind her. The girl, with closed eyes, has given up the struggle; the boy, pain distorting his face, claws at the ground. This Pre-Raphaelite-style sculpture originally stood in its own small pavilion in the garden of the Eduard Lippert family house at 107 Harvesterhuder Weg. She came to Ohlsdorf in 1956. * Lederer was also the sculptor of two large family graves at Ohlsdorf. I sought them out but neither had the quality of ‘Fate’, a truly terrifying work — in spite of the goddess’ flattened face and unflattering Pre-Raphaelite hairstyle, which gives the impression that she has walked many miles in the pouring rain and could use a good towel-down and blow-dry. There were so many discoveries to make in the Ohlsdorf cemetery: the masked, bandaged eyes of the woman in relief on the Thörl grave with its chained posts; the boy and girl sculptures at the Gaiser grave; the prone lion guarding the Dalmann tombstone; silvery, shredded bark glinting in the winter sun; prismatic drops of occulting melted snow on branches; the ornate water tower on Cordes-Allee, a forgotten turret of Mervyn Peake’s crumbling Gormenghast, flickering like a candle in Time’s yawn. By now it had become a place of magic as well as a garden of rest; full of life, no necropolis. *
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I had a vision of her journey: dragging the boy and girl behind her through the night, all the way from Harvesterhuder Weg (seven kilometres away, as the crow flies), shells and limestone grating on the Tarmac, leaving a trail of coarse sand.