If you think funerals are a private matter, you\u2019re clearly not German. Here, they\u2019re a highly regulated affair \u2013 with compulsory urn and coffin sizes, official rules for the material of your \u201cfinal outfit\u201d and, naturally, strict burial deadlines (poetic, really).<\/p>\n
One out of the 16\u00a0Bundesl\u00e4nder, however, has just loosened the red tape \u2013 and hopefully, the others will follow suit.<\/p>\n
Contrast that with the UK: I\u2019m always slightly stunned by British TV ads for funeral plans. I can\u2019t speak to the quality of these services, but you could watch German telly non-stop and never come across anything remotely similar.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Maybe the British are just better at facing the inevitable \u2013 slotting mortality neatly between\u00a0Emmerdale\u00a0and\u00a0Coronation Street. Or maybe it\u2019s because commercialising death in Germany is tightly regulated (another way of saying banned, basically).\u00a0<\/p>\n
The result? Despite an ageing population, death is rarely discussed in public and often dealt with at \u2013 quite literally \u2013 the last possible moment. And for decades, the whole admin surrounding death went largely unquestioned. Sure, hygiene matters, and human dignity deserves rules even after death. No one\u2019s advocating a DIY grave in the garden\u2026<\/p>\n
Historically, state involvement developed out of church control. In 786, Charlemagne banned cremation as a pagan rite and made churchyard burials compulsory. It took more than 1,000 years for the first official cremation \u2013 in 1874, in Breslau, during a naturalists\u2019 convention (you couldn\u2019t make this up).<\/p>\n
Fun fact: the second official cremation took place that same year \u2013 it was an Englishwoman, Katherine Dilke, the wife of under-secretary of state Sir Charles Dilke. She had specified this form of burial in her will, but as it wasn\u2019t possible in Britain at the time, she was moved to Dresden. A portion of Lady Dilke\u2019s ashes is still conserved in the city\u2019s archives.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Shortly after, a club was founded in the Saxonian capital: \u201cThe Urn \u2013 Association for the Facultative Incineration of Corpses\u201d, which in 1876 organised the first \u201cEuropean Congress of the Friends of Cremation\u201d. Monty Python would have been proud.<\/p>\n
It was the Nazis, in 1934, whose legislation put cremations on a par with earth burials. They also decreed that urns must be interred in official cemeteries. Many of those laws were later absorbed into state-level burial codes \u2013 and remain in force. That\u2019s finally about to change.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Funeral customs are evolving. Even the Catholic Church no longer insists that a burial in a coffin in a cemetery is essential for resurrection.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Cremation has been gaining ground for years, and placing a biodegradable urn at the roots of designated trees \u2013 the\u00a0Friedwald\u00a0(forest cemetery) instead of the\u00a0Friedhof\u00a0(graveyard) \u2013 is an even more sustainable and low-priced alternative.<\/p>\n
Local administrators have grudgingly accepted the trend, which for them means lower fees and vacant rows of burial plots. But they\u2019re partly to blame: after centuries of monopolising all things funeral, there\u2019s still a shocking lack of service mentality. In some towns, for instance, you can\u2019t even hold a funeral on a Saturday or after 2pm due to staff shortages \u2013 even though private undertakers could easily step in and fill the gap.<\/p>\n
The new funeral law in Rhineland-Palatinate is the first in Germany to truly roll back state control: it lifts the obligation to bury the deceased in a cemetery. You can now keep the ashes outside of graveyards \u2013 even at home, if you want to.<\/p>\n
Ashes may also be pressed into diamonds, Swiss-style. So-called shroud burials \u2013 ie no coffin \u2013 are permitted regardless of the deceased\u2019s religious beliefs. And river burials, as practised in the Netherlands, are allowed in the state\u2019s stretches of the Rhine, Moselle, Saar, and Lahn, using cellulose urns that dissolve in water.<\/p>\n
There are still certain rules: only licensed undertakers are allowed to scatter ashes outside of cemeteries or divide them into smaller urns if several family members want to keep a part.<\/p>\n
Critics, among them the Christian Democrats, lament that this is yet another nail in the coffin of public mourning in cemeteries. On the other hand, for a growing number of people, it\u2019s not the headstone or cross that keeps the memory of their loved ones alive, but a diamond ring or an urn on the living-room shelf.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And in the end: who\u2019s to judge? Certainly not the state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you think funerals are a private matter, you\u2019re clearly not German. Here, they\u2019re a highly regulated affair…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":481448,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5310],"tags":[2000,299,1824,26682],"class_list":{"0":"post-481447","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-germany","11":"tag-legislation"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115335459327383807","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481447\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/481448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}