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| Spreenhagen |
If you’re coming from north of Berlin, find your way to the Berliner Ring (A10), go towards Dresden / Frankfurt (Oder) (as opposed to Hamburg / Stettin (Szczecin)) (clockwise). At Ausfahrt 7, Freienbrink, exit and follow the L38 for about 3 kilometers to a traffic circle, then the L23 for about 6 kilometers to Spreenhagen.
Either way, you should
program your Garmin (if you have one) to Spreenhagen 15528, Friedhofstraße 1.
If you don’t have one, it’s still easy to find (Google map - click here).
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| Friedhofstraße |
Coming from the south,
you’ll enter Spreenhagen on Hauptstraße. Once you pass the Volksbank
Fürstenwalde, Friedhofstraße will be the second street on the right.
Coming from the north,
you’ll enter Spreenhagen on Hauptstraße; Once you pass the Deutsche Post Filale
on the right, Friedhofstraße will be the second street on the left.
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| Chapel |
As I entered
Friedhofstraße, I passed the Freiwillige Feuerwehr on the left, then veered
right towards the cemetery (left was the Ärztehaus). The cemetery was on the left.
I parked across the street, adjacent to the green gate, and spotted the
Jirkowsky family’s grave from the driver’s seat of my car; it was in the second
row from the end, towards the right (east) as I exited the car and walked
towards the gate. The cemetery is pleasantly immaculate, and unlike Berlin,
where I had just driven from, free of graffiti. In fact, the entire town of
Spreenhagen was immaculate, and (almost) free of graffiti. The cemetery chapel
was locked, but nevertheless provided a serene and holy atmosphere throughout
the cemetery.
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| Marienetta's grave |
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| Cemetery gate, and Marienetta's grave from the street |
My first experience with
the name “Marienetta Jirkowsky” (article in Wikipedia - click here) was
when I was a young single airman in Berlin, and her story was in the headlines
in late 1980. She was my age, and her photos revealed a very attractive and
seemingly friendly and happy young lady. I seem to remember that the Jirkowsky
saga got the attention of many of my colleagues who were my age or in my peer
group. This particular Berlin Wall victim was an unfortunate lady that many of
us would love to have met. We didn’t have Wikipedia back then, so we were able
to find out little information about her, although Falko Vogt and Peter
Wiesner, her successful accomplices in their joint escape attempt from Hohen
Neuendorf to Frohnau on November 22, 1980, received a fair amount of publicity
in Bild Zeitung. Our question was, “what caused this lovely young lady to want
to do something as dangerous as this?”
Of the at least 140 Berlin Wall victims, Marienetta’s grave is one of the more remote graves, being
it’s not in Berlin. Also, unlike the graves of Peter Fechter, Ida Siekmann, and
Chris Gueffroy, which are preserved as historical graves, Marienetta’s grave is
one of the more obscure graves. Nothing about this grave suggests anything more
than a simple family grave, a mother and a father, whose daughter died earlier
than normal. I would hope that in the future, this grave will not only be
preserved as historical, (beyond the 25 year law governing the longevity of
most graves in Germany), but also be noted as a grave of one of the victims of
the Berlin Wall.
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| Bärbel Kultus |
But this is unlikely to
happen as long as a certain Bärbel Kultus is still around. Bärbel is Marienetta’s last
known surviving relative, and the self-appointed spokesperson for the Jirkowsky
family. She vehemently opposed the 2010 renaming of a Hohen Neuendorf traffic
circle to “Marienetta Jirkowsky Platz” Her pleas with the Hohen Neuendorf
mayor, a member of the leftist “Die Linke” party and a former East German
communist party member, who would echo these pleas, were overruled by the city
council, with its moderate and more realistic SPD majority. Her claims were that mourning
should be a private family matter, and that there is no merit to having been
killed at the Berlin Wall. What Bärbel would probably rather we didn’t know is
that since 1970, and until the dissolving of the GDR in 1990, she was also a former East German communist party member,
as well as a Stasi informant (Stasi-Rat).
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| Birkenweg 13 |
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| Marienetta Jirkowsky August 25, 1962 - November 22, 1980 |
