By the later nineteenth century the arithmetic had become obvious. Berlin was industrialising and swelling, and the parish burial grounds inside the city could not keep pace with the death rate. The Berlin City Synodal Association went looking beyond the boundary and bought roughly 156 hectares of partly wooded ground between the Parforceheide forests to the north and west, the new Potsdamer Landstrasse to the south, and the village of Stahnsdorf to the east. The site was consecrated on 28 March 1909. The first burial followed eleven days later, on 8 April — a retired teacher named Elisabeth Wenzlewski. Then the old city cemeteries began emptying into it: some 33,000 graves were lifted from six Schöneberg parish grounds and moved out here, headstones and all. Within twenty-five years the new cemetery had taken more than 35,000 interments, close to a third of everything it holds today.

Getting a coffin from Berlin out to Stahnsdorf was no small undertaking, so in 1913 a railway was run down from Wannsee and a station was opened on the cemetery forecourt itself. It carried the dead, and it carried the mourners with them. Officially it was the cemetery railway; Berliners called it the Witwenbahn, the widow railway. It ran for just under five decades. When the Wall went up in 1961 the line was cut, and with it the whole logic of the place — the graves stayed in the East, the families who visited them stayed in the West, and a burial ground built to serve a metropolis found itself severed from it. Keeping the site from vanishing back into the pines became a long, patient job. Since 1991 the church has put more than six million euros into it.

The chapel is what you see first and remember longest: a timber church of steep dark gables modelled on the stave churches of Norway, built between 1908 and 1911 to plans by the church architect Gustav Werner. Inside, Art Nouveau glass throws colour across the woodwork and a pipe organ by Wilhelm Sauer still sounds; the building holds funerals and services, and now and then a concert. Werner himself lies in the row of graves directly in front of it. Around the chapel the ground opens into something closer to parkland than graveyard, which was the intention — Stahnsdorf was among the first rural cemeteries in Germany. Film crews find their way here constantly. Roman Polanski shot a scene of The Ghost Writer in the Lietzensee block in March 2009, Julian Rosefeldt filmed the eulogy from Manifesto here with Cate Blanchett, and the chapel turns up in the Netflix series Dark.

Each parish received its own block, and the blocks filled with the people who built modern Berlin. Werner von Siemens is here. So is Gustav Langenscheidt, whose name is still stamped on dictionaries, and Heinrich Zille, who drew the city's poor with more affection than anyone before him. The composer Engelbert Humperdinck, the painter Lovis Corinth, the geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, the polyglot Emil Krebs. And F. W. Murnau, interred on 13 April 1931, a month after a car overturned on the Pacific Coast Highway and killed him a week before Tabu premiered. The mausoleums between them amount to an open-air museum of German funerary sculpture — the Caspary family tomb of 1911, the Langenscheidt vault, figures by Kurt Kroner, Ludwig Manzel, August Kraus. Murnau's is the one people come looking for, and in 2015 someone came for more than a photograph.

After the First World War the British and Italian governments each acquired about a hectare inside the cemetery to gather their own dead. The Commonwealth plot holds 1,177 men, the Italian one roughly 1,650. Most were young, and all of them died a long way from anyone who knew them; the Commonwealth War Graves Commission still tends the British section, listed on its books as Berlin South-Western Cemetery. Queen Elizabeth II came to lay a wreath there on 3 November 2004. A German memorial to the war dead stands elsewhere in the grounds, so that within a few hundred metres you can stand among men who were sent to kill each other and are now kept by the same gardeners. Around all of it the forest has simply carried on — more than 200,000 trees, forty species of bird, two hundred kinds of butterfly, and four species of bat roosting in the crypts.