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: grave desecration
Centuries of Bodies Ch 6 pg 15
It is striking, in retrospect, that not all cemeteries here have been destroyed. The Jewish cemetery was destroyed before the war by Germans and a plaque is all that marks the site on the north edge of Heydekrug. But throughout the area it is clear certain cemeteries were targeted for destruction. Not all cemeteries containing Germans had to be expunged. The effort was not directed at all religious sites. The British and American pilots at the prisoner of war camp have graves undisturbed; the Catholics in the city are safe, but all traces of German Lutherans are gone. The only acknowledgement they get is from the wind blowing over their bones now scattered between the heather.
As I traveled through Europe I’d often wonder that any cemeteries were left at all. There were those troops marching back and forth, pillaging and plundering, two thousand years history, revenge and retaliation, tanks rolling back and forth, bombs smashing the landscape, mass graves. There can’t be a piece of land untouched by violence in some way. Or, on the other hand, think of all the hundreds of thousands of people that died in Europe. Doesn’t it seem there should be a lot more cemeteries? Where are all those bodies from all the centuries before?
Where Did the Cemeteries Go? Ch 6 pg 12
Later when I was back in the U.S., I wondered why we couldn’t find even a trace of many of these old country cemeteries, especially as there was the big Catholic cemetery in the town. It was intact and still in use. Was it religion or revenge or a combination of the two that was the determining factor as to which cemetery survived?
Over the years there were rumors among displaced East Prussians on what happened to the old German cemeteries of their homeland. I thought about these rumors that claimed Lithuanians dug up cemeteries ravaging the corpses for jewels and gold fillings. Maybe there were some cases of this since the throughout history the poor pictured the ruling class with much more wealth than they had in reality. And of course they might well bury some of those valuable possessions with the dead. In the hard days after the war, I wouldn’t be surprised if some opportunists did resort to grave robbing due to the desperate circumstances they found themselves in. But I could never have imagined what actually happened in these cemeteries.
Doing some research on the internet I discovered a publication specifically about the cemeteries of East Prussia. I found it in the Annaberger Annalen, a yearbook of Lithuanian and German-Lithuania relationships. Martynas Purvinas writes in great detail about the destruction of the cemeteries in Memelland after 1944, using eyewitness accounts. This area is also known as Kleinlitauen or Preussiche-Litauen. He maintains that what is unique to this area is the evolution of a Baltic death cult interwoven with the Lutheran practices. Instead of one central cemetery, some cities had several cemeteries so that cemeteries could be located closer to the individual families and they could actively maintain the grave plots. Some of the families went so far as to keep burial sites in the courtyard of their house and that way kept ancestors a part of their daily lives. This didn’t seem to be the practice in the villages around my mother’s farm; one cemetery for each village was enough, unless someone was secretly burying people behind the barn, but it was hard to do anything in such tight village settings without all your neighbors knowing about it.
Cemetery Alignment
The township cemeteries aren’t noted on maps. You can find them just touring back roads, and often you have to really get on the back roads, unpaved gravel roads, and you’ll find them. They are small, so if you’re driving the speed limit you’ll see them too late to find a drive to turn in; then you have to find a drive and turn the car around, as usually happens to me. But a stop is a history lesson and gives us occasion to consider our own mortality.
So here I am on my hands and knees tearing the overgrowth grass off old marble slabs in an effort to get a clear photo for the online archives. I’m sure it has been a very long time since anyone fussed around this grave. These old ones set upright in the dirt and over time tipped over. Every year the visible portion shrinks a bit as grass clippings accumulate, dirt blows in and rain settles in the crevices. The marble is easily eroded and the letters on many are illegible.
Generally around 1880’s granite markers are first seen. The new granite monuments are more solid, sit upright and regulations require a concrete base for the marker. This alleviates a lot of the settling problems that happen when several hundred pounds of stone is set on bare earth.
The old graveyards are laid out with the bodies on an east – west axis. Heads should be in the west according to the Christian belief that bodies need to be ready for Judgment Day. When the sun rises on that great day, the dead can sit up and face the coming of the Lord.
New cemeteries are laid out according to the principles of efficiency and economy – need to make money and keep the lawns well manicured. They are platted out like a Michigan campground – every square foot maximized.
This process of first taking a photograph then transcribing the information readable on the tombstone gives ample opportunity for insights. I can see what is important to each generation in what they want remembered. I also see how the different eras relate to death. Generally, as far as U.S. history goes, we have a relatively short time span of tombstones to work with. In this area of Michigan you don’t find many gravesites dating before 1850. And even from that date, markers are gone, eroded, and many graves are just unmarked. People didn’t always purchase tombstones. So I am working with only about 150 years of source material in these township country cemeteries.
In older cemeteries the ground made be slightly sunken in places. This was thought to be enough of a problem that in the 20th century regulations required use of a burial vault to prevent the earth settling. Old coffins deteriorate with time and then the earth collapses in. Some burial vaults are available with the bottom open to allow for the normal process of ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The process is inevitable regardless of what measures you take to slow it.
Cemetery Finds Ch 6/pg 4
“Oh my gosh,” my mother finally speaks. Now it all makes sense – the lumpy ground, the reason tractors plowed around the area, trees growing only at the far edge of this field. It is a burial ground and everyone knew it and avoided sacred soil.
After a moment of thinking about this, our dark sense of humor comes back.
“Mom, since Sabine didn’t want to come along on the trip, maybe we should take one back to her as a souvenir of her relatives.”
My mom replies quick as a flash – “No, this wasn’t our cemetery. We’re not related to them.”
We wondered about what happened to this burial ground. Maybe it was true that poor Lithuanians who heard stories of rich Germans being buried with gold dug up the bodies in the aftermath of the war. They were destitute. That seemed a likely explanation. Why else would anyone dig up a cemetery, desecrating the dead?
So where was our cemetery, that one that served the village of Gnieballen, where the Redetzki girls were born? That was the village the Brumpreisches were born and raised for at least 4 generations. Taking out my trusty 1938 German topographic map, I examine it minutely. With my glasses on and without, I can just make out a cross symbol located right on the map fold, of course. I really need a magnifying glass. It is somewhere in those woods located across the road. So it’s time for us to take another adventurous excursion into the countryside, although in this case it will be away from open fields and deep into the woods.
From my father I heard the story of the time when his own father died. It was a farm accident that killed George Klemm in November 1931. The body was, of course, laid out at home. In those times the family took care of the preparation and lying out of the body. They cut the fingernails and hair so he would be presentable and they dressed him.
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.
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