German Waldheim Cemetery, previously known as Waldheim Cemetery, and currently named Forest Home Cemetery is located at 863 Des Plaines Ave. in Forest Park, a suburb of Chicago in Cook County, Illinois. It was originally founded in 1873 as a non-religion specific cemetery, where Freemasons, Roma, and German-speaking immigrants to Chicago could be buried without regard for religious affiliation. In 1969, it merged with the adjacent Forest Home Cemetery, founded at the same time, with the combined cemetery being called Forest Home (Waldheim means forest home in German).
Because it was unassociated with any religious institution, it was chosen as burial place of the Haymarket Martyrs. After they were buried there, the cemetery became a place of pilgrimage for anarchists and leftists. Because of its role as a pilgrimage site for the international left, the Haymarket memorial there was the first cemetery memorial to be designated a National Historic Landmark. The Haymarket Martyrs' Monument by sculptor Albert Weinert is located here.
In homage to the Haymarket Martyrs, many other anarchists and socialists are buried at Waldheim, including:
- Joseph Dietzgen
- Voltairine de Cleyre
- Emma Goldman
- Ben Reitman
- Lucy Parsons
- William Z. Foster
- Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
- Eugene Dennis
- Franklin Rosemont
- Raya Dunayevskaya
The English part of the cemetery—that is, Forest Home—includes the graves of:
- Billy Sunday
Famous quotes containing the words german and/or cemetery:
“Frankly, I do not like the idea of conversations to define the term “unconditional surrender.” ... The German people can have dinned into their ears what I said in my Christmas Eve speech—in effect, that we have no thought of destroying the German people and that we want them to live through the generations like other European peoples on condition, of course, that they get rid of their present philosophy of conquest.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)