In April 1880 Marie Berna visited Arnold Böcklin at his Florence studio, where a painting in progress caught her eye. The scene was dark and mournful, but there was something about it. A hunched oarsman steered a boat through an inky sea and towards a rock island dense with cypress trees. Böcklin tried to propose a light and joyful idea for Berna’s commission, but she was so impressed by the somber, half-finished piece that she asked whether he could paint another one, just for her. She said, specifically, that she wanted ‘a landscape over which one could dream.’ Böcklin would comply, beginning not one, but two more versions of Die Toteninsel or ‘Isle of the Dead’.

Two months later, Berna’s painting nearly finished, Böcklin added a final flourish of drama. A few strokes of white oil paint fill in the outline of a shrouded figure and a coffin at the helm of the boat. The figure was meant to depict Madame Berna herself as she accompanies the remains of her young husband, who had died of diphtheria in 1865, to his final resting place. Böcklin liked the edit so much that he then went back to the first version of the painting and added both the figure and coffin.

Due to the interest of other private patrons, between 1880 and 1886 Böcklin kept returning to the motif of the otherworldly, serene island of the dead; four versions of the painting survive. Böcklin’s dealer, capitalizing on the popularity of Toteninsel, commissioned Max Klinger to make an etching of the third version of the painting, which became something of a sensation by the turn of the century, with reproductions finding their way into households throughout Germany. Even much later, in 1934 in his novel Despair, Nabokov mentions in passing that the image could be found ‘in every Berlin home.’

The Berlin iteration of the painting, now hanging in the Alte Nationalgalerie, includes an inscription: non omnis moriar or ‘I shall not wholly die.’ Is this conclusion – the statement attributed to Horace – one that Böcklin could have arrived at only through the process of painting the same scene so many times? Maybe one has to die many deaths before the vision of the afterlife is clear enough to commit to oil on canvas.

It was Böcklin’s dealer who suggested the title Toteninsel. Böcklin had originally called it Gräberinsel, which translates to ‘Grave Island,’ and conjures images of a grove of cypress and stone, a sepulchral gated labyrinth where you cease worldly navigation and become pleasurably disoriented, unsure whether you are coming or going.

I started visiting my local cemetery, or Friedhof, as an escape. Located just behind my place of work – the restaurant I own – I could dip into the cemetery when I was overwhelmed by the endless needs of the customers, the team and my business partners, not to mention the demands of the physical space, an old building where something broke down on a near daily basis. In the Friedhof I could be alone, yet, crucially, I didn’t feel lonely there.

Escape or not, I liked being in the Friedhof. I like how the din of the city would fall away upon slipping through the gated threshold and into the maze of dilapidated crypts. I liked the random way the graves of well-known composers or scientists of the Romantic era collided against the freshly planted plots of the anonymous contemporary. Barely visible lettering chiseled in stone centuries ago vied for attention against the precision of machine-engraved epitaphs and the cheap perfection of plastic rainbow pinwheels commemorating the more recently buried. Mostly I would walk, weaving my way through the rows of graves, the less-travelled pathways infinitely more enticing, but sometimes I would sit on one of the benches and just look and listen. It was a kind of active meditation.

The cemetery pulled open a crevice, a full breath of space, where I could contemplate something outside of my pulverizing to-do list. I got curious about the people buried there. Chamisso, Mendelssohn, Gräfe and Bülow I knew – their names were on the streets and squares of my Berlin neighborhood – but for T. Lemke or F. Rothschild I could only invent a life. I had a date of birth, a date of death and the rest was a blank I could fill in for myself.

Then, nearing the end of that year, I found myself in the doldrums of a burnout that had likely been simmering for so long that when it at last became unavoidable, everything seemed to collapse. I couldn’t go to work and any semblance of a creative life I once had felt pointless. My emotional state made doing anything remotely concentrated untenable. For the first time in my life I had no appetite. Hollowed out by insomniac nights, my daytime body was physically exhausted. My daytime mind on the other hand felt dizzyingly alert, as if it had been excoriated of the chaff of routine and suddenly freed. What could I do in this terrifying state? Mostly it was just listening to podcasts and looking for therapists who spoke English, but on occasion I would force myself out on a walk.

While wandering a remote corner of the Friedhof on one of those drizzly afternoon walks, I was browsing the names on the gravestones, vaguely on the lookout for a woman who wasn’t described simply as ‘wife and mother.’

Rahel Varnhagen von Ense (1771-1833) was the one. The dignified plaque in front of her headstone reads ‘patron and writer.’ Not a shred of obedience in her inscription, she is nevertheless interred beside her husband, Karl August. Both are buried in an identical manner: under the same ivy blanket, puffy in front of two white pillow headstones.

I did a quick google search on my phone right there in the Friedhof. Rahel was born Jewish, but converted to Christianity just prior to her marriage at the age of 43. I noted that Karl August was 14 years her junior, a fact that I can only imagine made even Enlightened eyebrows raise. She was best known for hosting salons where prominent poets, intellectuals, scientists and artists – figures drastically different from one another in religion and status – would meet to converse and debate the issues of the time. Throughout her life, Rahel was dedicated to writing letters, understanding them to be a way to keep alive dialogue begun in the face-to-face encounters of the salons. Out of the epistolary correspondence, secondary dialogues would emerge and further transmogrify in real life.

The Goethe-cult, which formed in Berlin, was largely thanks to Rahel. The poet was her Liebling, her favorite writer, and, though they only met in person a couple of times, his words accompanied her throughout her life. Goethe’s poetic language offered Rahel a way to reimagine herself as part of his words and therefore as an essential part of German culture. She didn’t speak German masterfully and could never be accepted as German, nor was she fully rooted in Jewish tradition. Rahel felt she always existed in the in-betweenness of non-assimilation. She thought of Goethe as her ‘mediator’, and wrote of him as ‘my permanent security, so that I do not fear illusory phantoms, my higher master, my dearest friend…’

My phone was running out of battery. The cold rain began to soak through my coat. I left the Friedhof through the exit I wasn’t familiar with, confused and longing for details about what Rahel’s world was like in the Berlin of the Romantic era. I wondered what kind of tone she took in her voice, as she conducted her famed salons. I wondered whether she tended towards gossip. Whether she liked the way she looked. I wondered if she was frustrated in a life dedicated to bringing together notable men, instead of a life as an artist in her own right. I felt a need to learn not only the facts of her life, but also these more intimate things.

At least during those visits to the cemetery, Rahel pulled me out of my own overcrowded headspace. She let me remember that I am a curious person by nature and could use the curiosity as fuel to propel myself out of clouds of worry located in the present, and into a more timeless realm of creating.

My second phase of regular visits to the Friedhof came with the arrival of unexpected company in spring of 2020. This was a time when the greater public also began meandering the cemeteries of Berlin in disoriented droves. While the maelstrom of news cycles and the tense uncertainty of the early pandemic coexisted with a tempered reality of quiet nights, empty streets and blank social calendars, we still had to do things like feed and entertain ourselves, sleep, exercise, take care of loved ones and work. To tightrope walk the interstice of a slowed urban tempo and a breathless, unravelling shared world seemed to be the task of the moment.

In Germany, during the pandemic peaks we had relatively strict lockdowns. There were periods of months when no indoor dining was possible, when all bars, cafes and shops remained closed. We were not supposed to gather with more than five people from two different households. For the most part, the restrictions were taken seriously. So to save ourselves from the pain of isolation, we invested in warmer coats and in fur-lined boots, and went out walking.

For me, the cemetery in those days was probably a substitute for a museum. I spend a lot of my free time looking at art, and when that was no longer possible, the cemetery was similarly a place where aesthetics and history mingled. Green, confined and sometimes wild with overgrowth, it offered a cleft between a cultural and natural experience. For other city-dwellers maybe it was the same. Or maybe it was a simple diversion, even a kind of theme park: a slice of comfort in a shut-down world. In any case, suddenly it seemed like every bench was taken. The tree-lined allées, once only occupied by squirrels, were now pathways as well-trodden as those in the most beloved parks.

Strolling through the Friedhof one day with my friend Lina and an oat milk cappuccino (to-go), I started complaining about how crowded the cemetery had become. I told her I was here before, when I was alone to contemplate the vagaries of shrapnel hitting one mausoleum but not another. Now the Friedhof was practically a scene.

Lina had just ended a relationship with a philosopher and was doing a lot of reading in the aftermath. She said I shouldn’t be so surprised. Had I heard of Foucault’s theory of the heterotopia? No? She went on to explain that heterotopias are the places outside the everyday realm that serve to contradict the actual spaces we inhabit. Ships, hospitals, museums, brothels, hamams and cemeteries – they’re all vastly different, but all heterotopias with their own temporalities, with the power to accumulate or abolish time. When we enter the cemetery, walking between the graves of those dead twenty or two-hundred years, time as it’s measured in the outside world ceases to be relevant.

I thought about the hospitals where people dying of Covid were lying, unable to be visited by their loved ones. I considered the museums, brothels and hamams that were all shuttered. Of course the cemetery would be an obvious place to escape the undifferentiated temporality of pandemic ‘real life’.

We stopped in front of Rahel Varnhagen’s grave.

“I’ve gotten a bit obsessed with Rahel,” I admitted.

Lina perked up. “Oh! You know Hannah Arendt wrote her first book about Rahel Varnhagen, don’t you?

I shook my head, a little ashamed that, despite my research, I didn’t know.

“Why Rahel, anyway?”

“Totally random.”

“Nothing is totally random. You made a choice,” Lina said. “You swiped right!”

I laughed. “Exactly. And now we text constantly.”

“What does your boyfriend have to say about that?”

“He has no idea.”

My resentment at the overfilled Friedhof dissipated. Had we all, through the crisis of pandemic, become osmotically aware of the cemeteries’ heterotopic power? If we couldn’t be in the presence of other living people, did we purposely seek out spaces where we could be present with the dead? I remembered how, on my first visits to the Friedhof, I had felt alone but not necessarily lonely, and how I struggled to understand the meaning of that. Maybe the heterotopia of the cemetery, similar to the spaces of our dreams, of fiction and art, is a place that enables us to find a breath of peace in the unknown.

What was it about Rahel Varnhagen’s grave that held my curiosity? Our relationship deepening, I would make excuses to visit her grave at the Friedhof regularly. The biography by Arendt was proving difficult to find. Only Lina would recommend something so obscure. In searching for the book, I felt something being withheld from me. Even though I struggled through reading Rahel’s letters in another book I checked out of the Amerika Gedenkbibliothek, as they were written in an old, peculiar German, I scoured them for fascinating bits that might prove her to be even more revolutionary than her iron plaque could suggest.

Rahel’s letters, full of voice and empty of self-censure, conjure a woman who wavers like any of us do in the secrecy of our own minds, yet she is unafraid to show her doubts on the page. To ask, to learn, to write her way through a question, feels very modern. It occurred to me in reading her letters, knowing she had no formal education, that she may have suffered from something akin to our contemporary affliction of ‘impostor syndrome’, yet she doesn’t hesitate to write her uncertainties into her letters. Letters she knew would likely be passed on and, as was common at the time, read aloud in group settings, to friends of friends.

Rahel has become a friend to me, too. A swipe turned to a second date, and a third, until we are rendezvous-ing at odd hours of the day, when I should be at work, or doing something productive. Or at least meeting friends who are still alive.

Examining the Berlin version of Böcklin’s ‘Isle of the Dead’ I’ve always wondered about the course of the boat through that still, crystalline sea. As a former competitive rower, I like to think I know a little something about rowing technique, even as it’s depicted in a 19th century symbolist oil painting. Despite the fact that the shrouded figure faces the direction of the island, as if awaiting the moment the boat will hit the shore of the afterlife, the oarsman is positioned in a way that indicates he’s rowing away from the island. So, which way is it? Is the oarsman – usually interpreted to be Charon, the ferryman of the underworld in Greek mythology – rowing Marie Berna and the coffin towards the afterlife or away from it? Are they returning home or leaving home for a foreign territory?

I see the shore of the island as a doorway, similar to the gate of a graveyard. The symbolism of the gate as a cosmic boundary is acknowledged in ritual and burial practices in mythologies worldwide. To cross a threshold is to unite oneself with a new world. Yet Böcklin’s painting shows us that we can also choose to be a visitor to a new world, or the world of the dead: we can unite with it, then leave. In the case of Berna, she travels across the River Styx with her husband, accompanying him to the shore of the island. The ritual of passing through by boat ensures he will be accepted to the afterlife, but also that in her loss, Marie Berna herself shall not wholly die. She has approached death, has stared it down, and then she tells Charon to row her back home, to the mainland of the living.

After months of searching, I got my hands on a newly printed edition of Hannah Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman.

As a teenager, Arendt also became enamoured with Rahel Varnhagen. Her manuscript of Varnhagen’s biography was almost completed by 1933, yet during the war years it was lost. She was left to re-write it based on substantial notes, original letters and quotes, finally having it published in German and then translated into English in 1957. She writes: “Rahel is my closest friend, though she has been dead for some hundred years.”

In Arendt’s revisiting of the life of Rahel, she extends a sympathy for her as a Jewish woman forced to assimilate in order to assume any kind of role in German society, yet reminds us that she still always carries with her, like a bag full of stones, her destiny as an outsider. Far from writing a traditional biography, Arendt sometimes assumes the first-person voice of Rahel – even transitioning into multiple voices, using ‘we’ – and weaves in fragments from letters, poems and books from Rahel’s time.

Rahel and Karl August had no children. After a period of unspecified bad health, she passed away before he did, yet she remained unburied in a hall in the Friedhof after her death, in a coffin with a small window. Aus Angst, scheintot begraben zu werden. During the Enlightenment, out of a lack of certainty at exactly the point at which an unconscious person could be pronounced dead, the corpse would sometimes be laid to rest aboveground in this state of suspended animation (Scheintot), in a coffin fitted with a viewing window, often with gas pumped into the interior. It was a kind of hedging against death. Thirty-four years later, Rahel’s remains were finally interred beside Karl August’s.

When Arendt begins her account of Rahel’s life using the first person plural – ‘It may well be difficult for us to understand our own history when we are born in 1771 in Berlin and that history has already begun seventeen hundred years earlier in Jerusalem” – she echoes the words Rahel is reported to have said on her deathbed:

"In solemn transport I think of this origin of mine, and of the whole interconnection of destinies through which the oldest memories of the human race are associated with the present state of things. Thus the forms most widely separate in time and space are connected with each other. The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life – having been born a Jewess – this I should on no account now wish to have missed.”

Just like Arendt expanded the voice of Rahel for readers of her biography over a century after the latter’s death, maybe it must be the work of future generations to further develop an understanding of our present with tools still unimaginable to us today or modes of interpretation we cannot yet fathom. In the Friedhof, all the different versions of Rahel – the ones she has been permitted until now and the ones she will continue to assume – are swaddled together, in the soil, under a pelt of ivy. To gaze at the grave and to consider this multiplicity gives the slightest glimpse of something let loose to evolve, something with the audacity to transcend mortal time.

Two years after the first cases of Covid are identified in Europe, Russia invades Ukraine. Crocuses are emerging from the ground. Purple, yellow and cream, they strain their way through the humus, having finally sloughed off the smothering winter. The beautiful early arrival of spring feels perverse against the backdrop of the gruesome news of war so close.

My business, which staggered through state-mandated closures, labor shortages and public uncertainty for two years has reopened fully and swallows whole the hours of the week. Any free day I have feels like a Monday in December. And, as Anne Lamott tells us in Bird by Bird, “Mondays are not good writing days. One has had all that freedom over the weekend, all that authenticity, all those dreamy dreams, and then your angry mute Slavic Uncle Monday arrives, and it is time to sit down at your desk. So I would simply recommend to the people in my workshops that they never start a large writing project on any Monday in December. Why set yourself up for failure?”

What I see now is that despite the exterior difficulty, my writer self was quietly comfortable in the plush, dreamy dream of pandemic times. And now that we’re emerging from it, I don’t quite know what will happen to her.

My friend Lina who spent the early days of the pandemic in breakup mode has a new boyfriend. She suggests a walk on an abnormally warm Sunday in March. At the end of our stroll, we visit the Friedhof and rest on a bench to enjoy the faint heat of the sun. I close my eyes and realise it’s been a couple of months since I’ve walked through the cemetery gates. It’s not as crowded as it once was.

Lina tells me she’s pregnant. She seems happy. I know I shouldn’t be surprised by her news, but I am. So many people have altered their lives fundamentally during the last two years, yet I feel myself lingering in an uncomfortable stasis, as if between forward and reverse movement. I don’t want to have a child, but part of me envies her for what seems like ease of sliding into a new life.

“I’ve been looking at old nursery rhymes online,” Lina says.

“What, no more Foucault?” I ask.

“It’s interesting, I promise. Listen to this one. It was used by kids as a skipping song the year after the Spanish flu started: ‘I HAD A LITTLE BIRD, ITS NAME WAS ENZA. I OPENED THE WINDOW AND IN-FLU-ENZA!”’

“They played to that?”

Lina nods, excited. “Not so different from us calling COVID-19 the ‘Rona, right?”
We sit back and admire the flowers. Lina comments on the efflorescent blossoms: the powdery snowdrops and the vibrating yellow forsythia. Then, a little darkly, she says the flowers seem too early this year. I agree; say this winter wasn’t a real winter, even though it doesn’t feel like nearly enough to say. Out of my peripheral vision I catch sight of a man urinating alarmingly close to a gravestone. He scurries away, as if he remembers suddenly he’s not alone.

Two years of outdoor meet-ups and quiet coffees on benches and still I walk through the Friedhof, as if now out of pure habit. Have I come here to remember new life blossoming or to deal with the precariousness of living? Maybe, too, to make tentative friends with death.

Pandemic fears have been momentarily quelled, even wilfully forgotten, but millions have been buried in the meantime. One hundred years ago Europe and, eventually, the entire world were in the throes of another pandemic. Yet at the beginning of 2020 it seemed few of us were aware of the extent of the devastation ploughed by the Spanish flu, which notably affected the young and the fit. The coping mechanism of forgetting, as well as a political agenda of downplaying danger in favor of economic progress after WWI were likely among the reasons for this collective amnesia.

In the 21st century version of pandemic, lessons had to be re-learned the hard way despite new technology. Have we allowed the past to be silent or have we willingly silenced it? It has come back now, finally revealing its buried ugliness, its unacknowledged complexities, its thready pulse. Will we choose to continue to drown out a complicated past? Or will we wander the silent landscapes of the dead, acknowledging their urgency for the emotional needs of the living?

Rather than anaesthetising the unknown, turning it pretty and controlled, the cemetery can allow us to hover at the fuzzy line separating culture and nature; past and present; this reality and oblivion. I prefer to see it as a site that can embrace duality, or a kind of utopia where living can be on nodding terms with death. It follows that an unconscious that can’t deal with death also can’t deal with dystopia (climate change, pandemic). In other words, until we learn to reckon with death, the here and the now of living is elusive.

I’m not alone here amidst the landscape of the dead. I count the years between Rahel’s death and Hannah Arendt’s birth. I count the steps between the threshold of the Friedhof and Rahel’s plot, knowing that number may change one day, but not for a while, at least not until after I have ceased to walk that path, but maybe when another person has taken it up. If we the living can broaden our perspective of care and intentionality to include regard for the dead, it also implies interest in our fellow humans, the not-yet-alive and thus the longevity of the terrestrial home we share with them.

Sometimes when stories of war overwhelm, when pressure to be ever-productive leads to paralysis, or when I just want to feel the company of history, I step through the gates of any one of the overgrown cemeteries in my neighborhood. I walk slowly or find a bench under the shade of a tree. Rahel is still a friend but I’ll let Hannah Arendt keep her as a bestie. The Friedhof is no longer an acute pandemic refuge, but for one reason or another, we will always need those places that have the power to abolish time.

In the Kunstmuseum Basel hangs another Arnold Böcklin painting, an antipode to his ‘Isle of the Dead’ called, fittingly, ‘Isle of Life’ or Die Lebensinsel.

Despite the popularity of ‘Isle of the Dead,’ I can only imagine Böcklin was fed up after having painted so many versions of his allegorical island brimming with existential disquiet. Especially later in life, he was known to suffer from ill health and depression, and returned again and again to themes of death in his work. Already while working on the first version of Die Toteninsel, he had limited use of his painting arm due to an inflammatory illness. Art historians have located the possible inspiration for the island as the English Cemetery in Florence, where Böcklin and his wife had buried their baby daughter (six of their fourteen children died).

Marie Berna remarries not long after receiving her painting, at the end of 1880, to become Countess of Oriola. Her first husband, Georg von Berna, had died fifteen years earlier. Yet in her request to Böcklin, it strikes me that she still seems to be mourning her late husband. Or perhaps, knowing she will soon remarry, she wants to foment his death in the permanence of oil paint in order never to wholly forget him.

In 1888 Böcklin travels to Ischia off the coast of Naples to paint his newest version of the dreamy island. Now no longer a fortress steeped in silence, but a bucolic site of celebration, where humans swim with swans and where flowering trees and palms replace the cypresses, the image of ‘Isle of Life’ still reminds me of a graveyard, even though there are no direct visual references that would indicate Böcklin intended that reading. ‘Isle of Life’ will never become as popular as the ‘Isle of the Dead’. It will not find its way into popular literature or onto museum posters. But for Böcklin, an artist who had dwelled in death his entire career, painting that scene is a choice. Nearing the end of his life, with deaths in oil paint dried on canvas, vitality is at last on the horizon.

March 14, 2024

About the writer

Jillian May is originally from New England but currently resides at what was once the border of East and West Berlin. She owns a restaurant and store in a former post office. When she’s not there, she can be found writing in the local graveyard.