Schoonselhof

Brief information

Schoonselhof looks like a cemetery that has gathered together several different histories of Antwerp: a municipal burial ground, a Jewish section, and a war memorial. It was opened after the city bought the land for a new necropolis; later, many monuments from the old Kiel cemetery were moved here. As a result, some of the gravestones here are older than Schoonselhof itself as an active cemetery.

The military section changes the scale of perception: alongside Belgian graves are the burials of soldiers and officers of the British Commonwealth who died in the two world wars, as well as the graves of allies from several European countries and Russia. German remains were handed over to the German authorities, so the memorial’s composition speaks not only about losses, but also about how, after the wars, remembrance was distributed among national sections.

What to notice first

It makes sense to look at Schoonselhof as a place where different parts can be read through their arrangement. The Jewish section and the war memorial are presented in the original description as separate components, so the division of the territory itself is important: it shows that the cemetery is arranged not as a single field of burials, but as a set of sections with different meanings.

In the war memorial, you can compare groups of graves: Belgian burials, the British Commonwealth section, and separate graves of allies from France, Italy, Poland, and Russia. This composition explains why not only the names matter here, but also affiliation with different armies. A separate layer is formed by the monuments moved from the old Kiel cemetery: they recall that some of the visible gravestones ended up here because another necropolis was closed. The layout modeled on the Hamburg cemetery and the protected statuses of the site suggest another angle of view: Schoonselhof is valued not only as a place of remembrance, but also as an organized landscape and architectural space.