Rousseauinsel: The Philosopher's Island

Why is it significant?

Here, in the middle of a still pond, sits a tiny island, and on it a slim stone pedestal topped with an urn, framed by willows dipping into the water. Ducks cruise past it as if they owned the place. It feels like a painting, and that is no accident... it was designed to look like one.

Key Facts

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Here, in the middle of a still pond, sits a tiny island, and on it a slim stone pedestal topped with an urn, framed by willows dipping into the water. Ducks cruise past it as if they owned the place. It feels like a painting, and that is no accident... it was designed to look like one.

This is the Rousseauinsel, a memorial to the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, created in the late eighteenth century. When Rousseau died in 1778 he was buried on a little island of poplars in a lake at Ermenonville, north of Paris, and that grave became a pilgrimage site for all of Europe. Admirers copied it in gardens everywhere, and Berlin built its own. Rousseau had told his readers to go back to nature, and gardeners took him literally.

That idea shaped the whole Tiergarten. For centuries this was a fenced hunting forest for the Electors of Brandenburg. In the eighteenth century Frederick the Great opened it up as a pleasure park, and in the 1830s the great garden designer Peter Joseph Lenné reshaped it into the landscape you walk through today: winding paths, little streams, sudden clearings, ponds that look as if they had always been there.

Almost all of it is younger than it looks. In the bitter winter after the war, freezing Berliners cut down nearly every tree for firewood, and the park was dug up into vegetable plots. Only a few hundred of the old trees survived. In March 1949 the mayor of West Berlin, Ernst Reuter, planted a young lime tree to begin the replanting, and saplings came from all over West Germany to fill the empty ground.

So when you look at these tall trees, you are looking at a forest that was planted as an act of hope by a city that had nothing else to burn. Today the Tiergarten covers about two hundred and ten hectares, and it is home to woodpeckers, foxes and even the occasional goshawk. Follow the Großer Weg east through the woods for a few minutes, to another island, this one full of flowers and dedicated to a queen.