Death in East Germany, 1945–1990 by Felix Robin Schulz (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Death in East Germany, 1945–1990 by Felix Robin Schulz Erika Quinn Death in East Germany, 1945–1990. By Felix Robin Schulz. New York: Berghahn, 2013. Pp. xiv + 248. Cloth $95.00. ISBN 978-1782380139. Felix Schulz’s study of sepulchral culture belongs to a burgeoning body of cultural scholarship in the history of everyday life on the German Democratic Republic. Building on Monica Black’s excellent Death in Berlin (2010), Schulz investigates the role of state power in a fundamental cultural realm—how humans treat their dead. Often drawing comparisons to both capitalist and communist societies, the book [End Page 697] situates German sepulchral culture within broader Western processes of modernity: rationalization, centralization, secularization, professionalization, and the trend of growing distance from and repression of death itself. The study is concerned solely with “normal” deaths, excluding any political or violent deaths. Schulz argues that the uniqueness of the GDR’s sepulchral culture lay in its very high cremation rates and was shaped more by the desire for efficiency than by socialist ideology. Another striking aspect of East German death culture is the tenacity of rural customs and regional diversity. These characteristics serve to support Schultz’s larger argument about the relative weakness of the East German state in matters pertaining to death. The book is organized thematically with chapters addressing disposal, cemeteries, cremation, communal burials, and funerals. It also sketches out a rough three-part chronology beginning with the late 1940s to the early 1950s, a period of crisis with corpses of bombing victims piling up in cemeteries, scarce resources, and uncertain political relations. The second period, from 1952 to the early 1960s, saw growing centralization and state attempts to marginalize religion, which were expressed through the foundation of the Institut für Kommunalwirtschaft in 1962 and the municipalization of cemeteries. Despite the closing of the Democratic Republic to the Western world in 1961 and the Institut’s official mandate as shaper of socialist culture, Schulz argues that the state was not all that effective in exerting its will, particularly when compared to Czechoslovakia, which achieved a distinctively socialist death culture in the same period (143). The last period, from the 1960s until the end of the regime, was characterized by a real growth of socialist culture, as seen in the climbing rates of secular funerals, cremation, and collective, sometimes anonymous burials accompanied by declines in quality of service due to resource scarcity. This study provides raw data about death rates, burial rates, and types of funerals as well as many powerfully illustrative photographs of cemeteries and crematoria taken by the author. Schulz normalizes death culture in the GDR. He argues that much of its approach to death ritual was inherited from the reform period of the 1920s during which technocrats sought to secularize death rituals, demystify death itself, and rehabilitate it as a natural biological process. Overcrowding and the rapid turnover of burial spots fostered new cemetery construction in addition to the cremation movement. Reformers’ stripped-down sense of grave ornamentation is probably the most immediately visible influence to the casual observer. Ironically, Schulz claims that most elements of modern German sepulchral culture, both East and West, were in place by 1945 (35). While the two Germanies shared the reformist legacy, the GDR differed from the West in its lack of a private funeral industry as well as the notable and depressing lack of resources devoted to a respectful disposal and commemoration of the deceased. The author uses sepulchral culture as a strong example of “convergence theory” (65), which claims that rather than implementing orders passed down from the [End Page 698] Central Commitee, experts and technocrats utilized the Institut and other state organs to forward their own interests separate from those of the state. This theory serves to challenge the model of the GDR as an all-powerful and most repressive state in the Eastern bloc. Compelling support for this interpretation comes in the state’s failure to fully confront the Churches in the 1940s and 1950s over cemetery ownership; most cemeteries are still Church property. Another example of the state’s failure to completely dominate popular culture is mourners’ placement of flowers and name...