In Heaven Underground: The Weissensee Jewish Cemetery

Before presuming that a film about a cemetery must be a deadly serious affair, consider the following: Astonishing fact #1: The Weissensee Jewish Cemetery in Berlin contains 115,000 graves sprawled across one hundred acres of magnificent parkland, making it the largest active Jewish burial ground in Europe. Astonishing fact #2: It has been in continuous operation under Jewish authority for 130 years, including during the Nazi regime, which, curiously, left the cemetery and its archives undestroyed. Astonishing fact #3: This film—yes, a film about a cemetery—won the coveted Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary at the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival. In Heaven Underground is a lush, surprising and utterly absorbing journey into the lively stories hidden among the stones, pathways and woodlands of the Weissensee Jewish Cemetery. Not simply a chronicle of the cemetery’s famous philosophers, writers and artists—though its residents are a “who-was-who” of German Jewish achievement—the film brims with everyday life. We meet Benny Epstein, a Florida man, as he visits his grandmother’s grave for the first time; we hear how neighbors fell in love among the tombstones; we follow ornithologists for whom Weissensee is a valuable habitat for goshawks; and, most memorably, we meet Rabbi William Wolff, in his 80s, whose puckish insights into the foibles of the living help explain the staying power of this remarkable place.