Cemetery cafes are trending in Berlin—here's why

It’s said that life is a dance with death — but what about sitting down for a coffee with the Grim Reaper? Enter the cemetery cafe. Offering patrons the rare opportunity to sip flat whites in the company of the dearly departed, these surprisingly cosy spots have been cropping up across Berlin with increasing frequency, breathing new life into former crematoriums, funeral parlours and gravediggers’ cottages.

You’d be forgiven for assuming this particular trend is the product of some Teutonic appetite for the macabre (Germany did give the world 1922’s silent horror Nosferatu, after all), but cemetery cafes are as much about life as they are death. Unlike, say, New York, where the dead were historically buried on the city’s outskirts, Berlin is threaded with cemeteries — over 200 — each a small, peaceful sanctuary. The knock-on effect is they’ve become hubs for the communities they serve.

Berlin’s first cemetery cafe was founded in the leafy district of Schöneberg by actor and gay rights activist Bernd Bossmann. Many of his friends who’d died during the AIDS epidemic are buried at Old St Matthäus Churchyard, where folklorists the Brothers Grimm were laid to rest a century previously.

Bossmann decided it should be a more appealing place for the living, too. His solution? Café Finovo: a purveyor of coffee, cake and flowers set in what was once the groundskeeper’s cottage. Opened in 2006, it’s adorned with mementos donated by relatives of those buried outside.

Since then, around a dozen such spaces have opened in the city. Café Friedberg is one of two to open last year. All high, vaulted ceilings and arched windows, it occupies the 19th-century Kreuzberg funeral parlour in which its customers’ ancestors were quite possibly laid out. In good weather, the graveside patio is filled with locals sipping matcha.

Overlooking Georgen-Parochial Cemetery, Berlin’s oldest burial ground, Nonna Café & Co occupies a former florist and draws a young crowd with the promise of natural-wine tasting and Czech pastries. In neighbouring Mitte, meanwhile, bistro Lisbeth brings Italian flair to its cemetery setting, hosting workshops and exhibitions exploring life, death and grief. Pop your head into its bulb-strung garden and you’re likely to find friends reading tarot cards alongside mourners toasting a departed relative over prosecco and slow-roasted porchetta.

More graveyard experiences to try

Italy: A necropolis of lavish tombs, Venice’s main burial ground, San Michele Cemetery, fills its namesake island. Catch a water bus across the lagoon to admire the 15th-century church, or visit during the week around All Saints’ Day (1 November) and trot across via a floating bridge.

Austria: The Wiener Zentralfriedhof in Vienna is famous for its grand mausoleums and as the final resting place of Beethoven and Brahms. It’s also renowned for its tiny guests: keep an eye out for endangered European hamsters foraging between the graves.

Romania: Cimitirul Vesel (‘Merry Cemetery’) in the village of Săpânța is home to around 700 oak crosses decorated with darkly humorous poems and illustrations detailing the life and death of the person whose grave they mark. One features a skeleton dragging down an unfortunate soul as he swigs from a bottle of alcohol.

Czech Republic: How do you get rid of a surplus of skeletons? For the architects of the 14th-century Church of All Saints and Ossuary, in Sedlec, the answer was simple: use the bones for decoration. Candlelit tours of the lower chapel reveal skull chandeliers and other gruesome adornments.