OhOn the tree-lined shopping street in Berlin’s fashionable Gräfekiez neighborhood, two children are stuck in front of a brightly lit ground floor office space decorated with the low-key minimalist style of the design agency.
Their curious object was a Lego window display, showing a miniature cemetery and a coffin. The coffin was carried by four small pagodas and wearing a black top hat.
“I like this”, their mother said, Birgit Scheffler, the co-owner of the funeral home Das Fährhaus (ferry house), walked out the front door of the building. “It would be great if death is no longer a taboo for my children’s generation, and not for my own generation.”
The attractive appearance of Das Fährhaus is in stark contrast to traditional funeral homes, which usually “paint the windows black or close the shutters, maybe there is a dead fly lying on the window sill”, as Schaeffler said.
Her funeral industry specializes in alternative or customized funerals and is one of several companies currently illuminating the German method of death, which was once considered to be one of the darkest, most ritual and strictly regulated methods of death. Europe.
“After the war Germany, Our sad culture is shaped by the legacy of the two wars,” said 43-year-old Scheffler, who worked in a media company in marketing and distribution before receiving retraining in 2017. In ruins, death was pushed aside. “
Psychoanalyst couple Margaret and Alexander Mitscherlich (Margarete) and Alexander Mitscherlich (Alexander Mitscherlich) are famous for diagnosing Germany “unable to mourn”, this sentence was amplified by the 1968 student movement , And got a response in the country’s post-war history.
However, the coronavirus is becoming a catalyst for a new way of talking about mortality. “Death suddenly became the center of our lives,” Schaeffler said. “The first thing many of us do when we wake up is to look at the number of deaths in the past 24 hours.”
A national conversation about death has captured radio waves and TV screens. In “My Perfect Funeral”, in the acclaimed radio station Deutschlandfunk’s new series, interviewees described their desire to be buried at a depth of six feet.
Netflix recent Last wordAt the same time, German comedy star Anke Engelke plays a widow who reinvents herself as a eulogy speaker. “There is no wrong way of mourning,” Engelke said in the final episode’s voice-over. “It is terrible only when you take death seriously.”
Scheffler and her co-owner Sahra Ratgeber opened Das Fährhaus in August, when neighboring stores were struggling with social distancing requirements and losses during the spring lockdown.
Facts have proved that the new hygiene rules have also placed a burden on funeral homes, limiting the number of people allowed to participate in funerals, and requiring embalmedists to wear additional personal protective equipment. Opening of the coffin for funerals has been banned; the bodies of people who died or were infected with Covid-19 are buried in body bags.
However, in families that have lost loved ones, the blockade has inspired creative new ways to see the dead. This year, Das Fährhaus organized a funeral and allocated time slots for mourners, decorating the tomb with painted stones instead of traditional flowers. Another time, family and friends threw chocolate bars instead of sand on the coffin of the late chocolate maniac.
Her business provides mourners with the opportunity to build their own coffins or work with potters to make custom urns. “The more elements that family and friends can create by themselves, the better.”
She said that people are getting in touch more and more to write specific instructions for their funerals in writing: a lady dreams of being buried in a wedding dress, and a composer wants to make sure that some of her works are burned along with her.
The ridiculed “Snowflake Generation” in the 2010s may have something to do with the uniqueness she perceives, but Scheffler said she has noticed changes in people of all ages. “Even people in their 70s and 80s have become more creative.”
Louis Brown of the podcast “My Perfect Funeral” said that outside the German capital, due to the high tolerance for alternative lifestyles, more traditional end-of-life ceremonies still prevail.As a print and broadcast journalist based in Hamburg, Brown has also served as a Mourning speaker, “Mourning Speakers” for freelancers who don’t want clergy to deliver eulogy.
Although this “free speaker” tradition can be traced back to the free religious movement in the 19th century, other aspects of the typical German funeral are still unusually steeped in tradition.This country is one of the few countries in the world where a coffin or urn must be buried in a cemetery, the so-called Mandatory cemetery, It is forbidden to spread cremated ashes or distribute ashes to family members.
“Most Germans are still conservative about death,” said Brown, a 45-year-old British and German dual citizen. “The organ music at the beginning of the funeral, the church bells leading to the grave: for many people, these rituals are still important.”
She said that what is changing is the breadth of what can be said in the eulogy: “People want more personalized speeches, and they no longer want me to bypass the conflicts and difficult phases of a person’s life.”
Brown said that interviewing family and friends in preparation for a speech is like flipping through a photo album: “Usually the most interesting, honest, and true photos are loosely placed near the back page. In official photos after holidays, awards, or 50th birthday Photos taken at the edge of the meeting. Photos where no one tried to pose, photos that we thought were too blurry or out of focus. In funeral speeches, these are often the most recognized images of the deceased.”
The pandemic has also restricted the work of mourning speakers, not only banning group singing, but also banning the habitual gathering of coffee after the funeral, which Brown said may be more important than the funeral itself.
“After the corpse rests, there is usually a period of time when the bereaved are still very vulnerable and very open to each other. The intimacy of these gatherings is not something you can reproduce in a Zoom call.”
In the era of Covid-19, more and more families choose cremation, hoping that they can postpone public gatherings until after the pandemic is over (the urn is different from the coffin and can be stored for up to six weeks): According to the German National Funeral Association, cremation It now accounts for 70% of all funerals.
But even before the severe second wave of the epidemic in Germany and the ensuing Christmas blockade overwhelmed the hope of gatherings in the near future, many people have begun to look for alternative new ceremonies. Graphic artist Anemone Zeim started her “memory studio” Vergiss Mein Nie (Never Forget Me) seven years ago, helping people who have lost loved ones come up with creative projects to save their lost memories: cut from old Super 8 shots In the movie below, the recycled scarves come from the deceased grandmother’s favorite pullover, or the lampshade with the handwriting of the late friend.
“You can’t use a checklist to solve your grief,” Zeim said. “You need to be creative to find a personalized solution. You need to use your hands to prevent you from being trapped in your brain. This is the help we provide.”
In recent months, requests for her agency’s services have doubled, and emails come not only from the Hamburg region where she operates, but also from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
The so-called “grief tools” sold on the Forget Me Never website, such as funeral cards, “angry capsules” used to record unresolved feelings for the dead, or “flower tears” containing bulbs and a mass of soil, have always been high. Claim.
“We have been working hard,” Zem said, “not necessarily because more people are dying from the coronavirus, but because the people who have suffered losses are locked up in your own four walls. This is also good: you don’t have to Deal with the social stigma of being sad in public. But the danger is that you may be immersed in sadness.”
Zeim said that she expects demand will continue to grow in the new year. “The process of mourning may take months or years. Not only individuals can mourn, but society can also. As a society, we are already saddened by the loss this pandemic has brought us. It’s just that we haven’t realized it yet.”
