Ch 6-4 Renting Graves

On my travels through Europe I’d wonder that any cemeteries were left at all.  Troops marching back and forth, pillaging and plundering, bombs smashing the landscape, mass graves, plagues. Is there a piece of land untouched by violence?  Or, on the other hand, think of all the hundreds of thousands of people that died in Europe. Where are they?

In post war Germany a cemetery plot is rented for 25 years. If the lease is not renewed remains are removed and the plot resold. Family is entitled to keep any monument (have been used on personal patios, just flip it to the blank side, maybe). Australia refers to it as renewable tenure. Mom found this out to her great surprise and dismay on a trip to East Germany in the late 1990’s when she went to visit the family graves in Neumark, Sachsen, my birthplace. She was accompanied by her good friend Marianne Popp, my godmother, to the cemetery with flowers. For years Mom sent money for grave maintenance and flowers. She reached the cemetery fresh flowers in hand and walked to the graves. In 1965 she visited for her father's funeral. Papa Redetzki's grave should be right next to that of Lieschen, the oldest child. And her mother Else's ashes were sent from West Germany in 1972 to be interred with them. My mother became confused as she couldn't find the graves. Where were the gravestones? She stood there, flowers in hand, looking around, not understanding.  How could you lose graves?

Finally Marianne spoke up, “They took away the graves and the stones.” 

It was all gone. The headstones, the coffins, the bones were gone.  Mama, Papa and Lieschen.  25 years were up, ding, contract over, plots resold! New people are buried in the site.  No names of relations appeared on cemetery records so they didn’t know how to get a hold of her, the next relative, to give her notice. In a town as small as Neumark they certainly would have known the connection with Marianne. So they just bury over them after digging things up a bit. I’m still confused that in a town as small as Neumark no one made the connection to Frau Popp placing the flowers. A gravestone photo is the only remembrance. 

Turns out this is also the practice now in West Germany. Is there a word specific to describing when a grave site has been dug up and reused, sort of recycled? The exception to this practice are historic graves, such as those of Berthold Brecht and Pastor Dietrich Bonöffer in East Berlin.

How did they come up with the timeframe of 25 years – one generation, enough time to get over it, the average time in between wars?  Pragmatic Germans probably did some sort of study and rationalized it. Their thought is that land is valuable and you just can’t have one dead body taking up space indefinitely. What do they actually do with the grave contents? Sounds like they just sort of make a little bit of room. Strange to think about being laid on top of a stranger for eternity, or at least 25 years. 

In today’s Germany most dead are cremated.  And there is a waiting time for this service.  It’s created a strange industry for eastern European crematoriums to which German bodies are shipped. Odd turn of events considering what was done in Germany to so many others from those countries. The wait may be some two weeks to get the remains back.  Sounds a bit gruesome, all these corpses being shipped around Europe to be burned; have to wonder about the ashes received back.

I have few family grave plots to visit. No place to contemplate ancestors, the past and reflect on my own mortality as part of a continuing line of descendents.  I do now have the gravesites of my parents in central Michigan, a 3 hour drive. With their deaths it is my own mortality  brought into sharp focus. But do I want to be buried there?  While the cemetery is a nice rural township plot the area has no relevance for me. Do I want to spend all eternity some place I never lived?  Is it enough to be among family?  Or should my remains be used for the planting of a tree to flower and fruit?

Grandmother, grandfather, aunt, have had their gravesites removed. Others didn’t even get a grave – paternal grandmother and aunt – just shot along a road escaping East Prussia.  Others had their cemeteries used for building materials. Simply gone and forgotten as are all but perhaps the famous.

The Second World War scattered our bones across the western hemisphere. These are the upheavals resulting from war an migration. Ashes stored in closets; people killed in the turmoil of war getting no burial. The countless soldiers killed, civilian casualties, never found.