In current day Germany you will be moved out of your grave and the plot resold after 25 years. Australia refers to it as renewable tenure. When the time is up, family members can renew tenure or allow the site to be used to accommodate another coffin; how nicely put. My Mom found this out to her great surprise and dismay on a trip to East Germany in the late 1990’s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She went to Neumark to see her good friend Marianne Popp, who she knew from her days in Neumark right after the war. Marianne is also my godmother. The cemetery where her parents and sister, my own grandparents and aunt, are buried is right across the street from Marianne’s house.
For many years my mother sent money for maintenance of the plots and the purchase of flowers for the graves. On this visit, they went to the flower shop where my mother purchases nice bouquets for the graves. My grandmother died in 1972 in West Germany and her cremated body was transported back to the east for burial with her family. So my mother had never personally seen her own mother’s gravesite, but she had previously visited the graves of her father and sister, Liesbeth. It was all just so very cumbersome trying to get into the old East Germany as a capitalist American with travel restrictions and hoorendous visa requirements. And for people who once actually escaped the country, there was always a threat they might not get back out. Wasn’t much easier for West Germans to visit. East Bloc inhabitants were ‘free’ to visit other East Bloc countries, but your vacations were usually done in conjunction with a youth camp, or a workers camp on the sea, so some other structured organizational entity. You didn’t just get in your car and say “Let’s go to the Black Sea for a long weekend!”
Tag: germany
Dismal Elimination Round
Did you see that sorry final game for the Germans? I’ve never seen such a slow game, I thought I was watching sl-mo! They set back football years by such a dull game. The players were walking the ball around the field.
So now I have to root for the Dutch. I didn’t like the way Spain failed to shine in early games so I don’t want them to win.
I’m made at Brazil for making me watch these unenthusiastic players. They don’t even dance nicely when they win.
Celebrating the Funeral Ch 6/pg 6
Now some celebrations of these events may have been at home with only immediate family – but the church sacraments were open to all.
Funerals encompassed the whole community and was an important milestone for a village. We’re talking mortality here! They were routinely confronted with the reality of their death. This was truly significant and a bigger event than a wedding, this marking the end of life, reaffirmation of faith and acknowledgement of the living. People gathered to cook food which was served at long tables set up for the occasion, outside if weather permitted. There’d be plenty of cognac or schnapps – standard at any German event. All this eating and drinking resulted in a pretty lively gathering. Many ended with lusty songs sung and even some dancing. For people who didn’t have much to celebrate given the hardness of everyday life, they would make the most of these gatherings. People too had a more intimate awareness of death. You had to celebrate life. Childbirth, infant mortality, illnesses and diseases, farm accidents, war. No one was untouched by it in their daily life. Those that survived were hardy because the weak didn’t survive the hardships.
Most neighbors, acquaintances and the nosy showed up at the cemetery for the internment. People died at home; there was no embalming or funeral home services to disguise death. This was the practice through the war and on through the years after. The family cleaned the body and laid it out in a room of the house where people came to pay their respects.
Nowadays it seems children are conspicuously absent from funerals. The adults still mill about and visit with each other there in the room where the body lies cold and still laid out in a lovely cushioned casket bed as if to sleep, perchance to dream. But children have now been removed. It is thought too traumatic for them perhaps?
Discovering Cemeteries
As I think back on it, I’ve probably spent more time than most in cemeteries. Not that I have vampire tendencies or other strange fetishes. It started out when I was a child living across the street from one of the big Detroit cemeteries. We faced the back, unused part of the cemetery, through which the Rouge River ran. It was a great area for us kids to play and fantasize, digging pretend fortresses and running around all over the place and screaming. At night we would stand right up against the closed gate, eight feet high, and dare each other to climb the fence into that darkness beyond. Then we’d run back home eager with the thrill of being scared. It was so truly so much fun, the stuff childhood memories are made of.
And then as I grew up it was a great place to walk the dog – paved roads, great landscaping, and quiet. It was established back in the days when effort and money was put into trees and shrubbery. Now they were mature, gracefully decorating the rolling landscape.
It was in 1968 on my first trip back to Germany that I discovered cemeteries as information, history and sense of community. They were very interesting, particularly in Bavaria. Here many tombstones had photos of the decreased in additional to name and dates. This struck me as very bizarre practice and sort of creepy to actually see what the person six feet under looked like! It made it clear there was a real person under all that earth.
Later, during my college year in Germany I would wander through the small cemeteries of Freiburg in the Black Forest. I vividly remember the gravesite of a British soldier who died in Freiburg enroute to England from India. This has the makings of an E.M. Forester novel; it does seem ever so romantic. And I was in that romantic phase of studying in Germany.
Forgotten Cemetery Ch 6/pg 2
Tante Anna Brandt, their mother’s sister, and her family lived on a farm there near a patch of woods. With night approaching the roads were dark and lonely and the woods ahead looked scary to the little girls. Nighttimes are filled with the creatures that came right out of their bad dreams. But their mother didn’t give in to childish fears and they had to go. All they could do was hurry along as fast as they could to outrun their fears. Even in bright day over fifty years later, standing on the quiet roadside, her vivid memories and fears come back.
We wander around the tall grass looking for any remnants of tombstones, signs of a cemetery having once existed. There are two old gravestones left above ground but the pictures and plaques were torn off, likely sold as scrap. A small rectangular planter that once lay on a child’s grave now stands askew; it is filled with a full bouquet of wild meadow grass. Clear is that this area was intentionally left untended and untouched. Wild heather sprouts up in patches of purple blossoms between the tall grass. I’ve never seen heather in the wild and I thought about the old German song “Auf die Heide”. Then there were the military songs my father would listen to, where soldiers sang about Erica, on the one hand a name for heather, but then also a female name. Erica was in bloom, small purple flowers on a woody stem.
As I walked around I notice the ground unnaturally lumpy and full of hummocks. Long grass covers everything; it sways gently in the soft breeze. In present day Germany the cemetery plots are tightly placed next to one another. Individual graves have borders of stone or bricks meticulously groomed. It is all very orderly and densely crowded in today’s Germany. I would have thought that these older cemeteries shouldn’t be much different from that. I look about for more signs of fallen headstones, granite stone borders, brick edging.
Hitching a Ride Ch 3/pg 2
Our airplane crew assembles themselves on the sidewalk. A van pulls up and they get in. I ask if we can join them for the ride to Memel. During the ride we talk with our stewardess from the airplane who speaks some English. She wants to work on her English and I have a lot of questions. Outside is it really dark so I can’t see any of the countryside as we depart from the airport. I don’t see any hotels. This is so disorienting to arrive in the dark – but it heightens my anticipation for the next day. I peer out of the windows trying to catch some glimpse, a clue, wanting to get a sense of place. In the glow of the street lamps I at least can see store fronts, houses, shrubbery. Looks rather normal.
Our van pulls up in front of a store and some of the crew go in. Maybe they need to buy food before they go home after days of being gone. It is amazing that something is open at this hour. Even in Germany grocery stores don’t stay open this late. I peer out the van’s side window straining to look in the store; are the shelves full of merchandise, what kind of store is this? I need to get a feel for this country where I’ll be spending the next week to verify if this trip was a good decision or will it be a disaster.
My sense is that the people in the van, crew and driver, know each other well. There is camaraderie among them. I sense this even without speaking their language. There are so few flights at the airport, and even fewer out of the country. This is likely a routine this very crew has repeated many times.
Absolutely no traffic is on the road. It is a weeknight, but still seems awfully quiet. This is a two-lane road, no big highway to speed us through the countryside. Dark but not desolate by any means.
Crew members get dropped off along the way and then we arrive at the Hotel Klaipeda in downtown Memel (Klaipeda). It’s a big modern structure, at least 15 stories. Must have been the hotel of choice for the party faithful back in good old days.
Communists aren’t under our Beds
News from an acquaintance in Germany:
Silvi’s mom basically squandered everything she had. The government had already assessed the children’s income and wealth in order to ask them to contribute to their mothers monthly nursing home bill (Pflegegeld). She didn’t have a big pension either. The stuff she amassed 20 years ago which had value were expensive books which Silvi and her brother had to throw in the dumpster when she moved into the nursing home. The library (and nobody else for that matter) didn’t want them. So in the end there are a few photo albums left and clothing that nobody wants. The good people at the nursing home added to the memorable experience. While Silvia had intended to donate clothing and other items to less fortunate inhabitants of the home, the management already helped themselves distributing stuff among the old folk without her consent. When Silvia arrived the next day at the home, she found the rest sitting in the room, carelessly stuffed into blue garbage bags. Only in Germany …. The little money that was left covered the funeral. Case closed. Silvi can now go on with her life. This is Socialism in a former Communist state.
After reading about Silvi’s mom, it kills me when Americans call Obama a socialist. A young women in my census class made a statement about the government becoming communist. I told her you say that only because you have no idea what it is real communism or totalitarian state is like. She didn’t say anything else.
And I put forward that if you ask any refugee who came to the US (from lovely places like Iraq, Somalia, Vietnam, China, etc) if this country is now becoming one of those awful ‘socialist’ totalitarian states, they will tell you NO. My parents never thought this country was getting like Communist East Germany (except when I was forced to contribute to the United Way!). The ones making these claims (Palin, Tea Party) just don’t know what their talking about. I read that there was a protester at U of M Saturday that had a Obama sign with a hammer and sickle on it. He is showing what an idiot he is.
Americans are really such wimps. If someone cuts back on their soda pop consumption, it’s communism. What do they call it when someone kills your family because they are a different ethnic group? Or you they force you to join a radical political party in order to go to college. Or you have to spy on family and friends so you can keep your job?
Ch 2 We Take Flight pg 1
Before the outward-bound journey was over, we’d see four airports and pass through two additional countries to get to our destination. Seeing these airports in close succession makes the differences all the more striking. At least time would work in our favor, leaving in the afternoon and arriving in Lithuania late in the evening so we could go to bed before having to set out in a foreign land.
Living in Michigan it made sense to fly out of Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Chicago’s O’Hare would be about the same distance, but a lot more traffic getting there and the connections were no better. Metro is under construction once again, so maneuvering through the airport proved a greater challenge than usual. The airport was being totally overhauled with construction sites blocking much of the airport. We spared our relatives having to come see us off; none of them wanted to come on the trip. Neither my sister nor any of my nieces are interested in travel to Europe, and especially not Germany or our relatives.
Trying to eat at the airport proved a major challenge. A vegetarian, I pretty much have lost interest eating in most places, but these airport options set new lows to even find any edible food. We arrived with plenty of time and hoped to fill the time taking it easy and eating something nice. We will be totally immobile for an entire day so didn’t need to make ourselves feel any more bloated.
I recall that Detroit got an award for having the fattest population. I now know why. Just looking at the fast food menus posted above counters where sullen staff stood as immobile as mounds of lard draped in cheap polyester, it was enough to clog our arteries and raise blood sugar levels. Long lines of people stood zombie like for the high corn syrup and cholesterol offerings. We searched among the construction chaos for anything
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