From Friedhof to Friedwald - Or, How to Get Buried in (Post-WWII) Germany

Ulrich Halfmann is a retired professor of American Literature at the University of Mannheim (Germany). He has twice lived in Bellingham for extended periods.

When my father died of heart failure in the fall of 1945, one of the few questions my mother did not have to spend much painful thought on was where and how to bury him. Following and trusting established German tradition she “bought” (i.e. rented for 30 years) a family grave site in the Friedhof (cemetery) of her home town of Wülfrath (Rhineland), gave her husband a full-fledged Protestant funeral, enclosed the site with a low privet hedge, planted azalea and miniature rhododendron bushes and flowers, and set up a beautiful rough-hewn granite gravestone.

I was eight at the time. In the years to come my mother would often take my sister, my brother and me to “visit” my father and lovingly keep his “little place” in good order. When she died in January 1975 the urn with her ashes — she had decided in favor of a cremation — was interred next to the remains of my father’s coffin. Later the same year for a lump payment of several thousand Deutsche Mark (I don’t remember the exact amount) the lease was renewed for another 25 years.

In 2000, when a second renewal (and payment) came due, my sister Gertrud and I — my brother had died five years earlier — found ourselves confronted with a substantially changing (or changed) social world. Rapidly increasing mobility had lured many Germans out of their traditional habitats (we had both long ago moved to southern Germany, 500 kilometers from our parents’ graves).

The influence of the churches and of religion in general had declined significantly (I formally withdrew from the Protestant church in the 1990s); especially among intellectuals agnosticism and atheism abounded. In addition, the “green” Weltanschauung (world view) had become a philosophical and political Heimat (home) for many, environmentalism providing a serious and viable alternative to consumerism and commercialism.

Out of reverence and respect for my mother’s convictions we decided to again renew the grave lease (€2,900 plus €120 per year for the cemetery gardener to keep the place in decent order). But our own ideas of where and how to get buried, like those of many other Germans, had taken a very different direction. In the 1990s cremation and urn interment, a minority option a generation earlier, had become the most frequently chosen form of burial.

Since interment on private ground is forbidden by German law, the urns still ended up in cemeteries. But did German cemeteries have to forever remain what most of them had become: monuments of conformity, rows of mostly sterile miniature gardens tended by gardeners hired by absentee surviving dependents, a sinecure for a multimillion-euro funeral (and post-funeral) industry?

The answer that convinced me most came in the year 2000: “Friedwälder” (“peace forests”) instead of Friedhöfe (“peace yards,” i.e., conventional cemeteries). A clever business called “FriedWald Ltd.” based in Griesheim (Hessia) started buying suitable forests — a couple of hectares here, several hectares there — and selling urn burial sites around individual trees: no hedged-in or walled-in little flowerbeds, no gravestones, no dutiful gardeners, no costs apart from the (relatively moderate) rent.

The response was enormous, controversial at first (especially the Catholic Church objected), increasingly positive after a year or two (proving how much this idea had been “in the air”). Today “FriedWald Ltd.” owns 22 “peace forests” all over Germany. In addition, communities in several parts of the country have “copied” the original pattern, often modifying it by developing new concepts of their own. The Oberried “Ruheberg” (Hill of Rest) Bob Keller describes is one of them. (See front page article.)

It is also the final resting place my wife and I have been looking for, a place where we like to think we “belong,” 10 kilometers from where we have been living during the past three or four decades: a (literally) wonder-ful area of ancient hillside woodland 1,100 meters high in the Black Forest, luminous, magical and majestic. Our contract with the community of Oberried was signed in May of this year; paperwork fees (€92), funeral expenses (€280 each) and the rent for a tree (€3,000 for a period of 40 years dating from the last interment) have been paid.

The tree we chose is a red beech (Fagus sylvatica), approximately 120 years old, 20 meters high, stately and elegant, the bark of its sturdy trunk smooth and silver-gray. After only six months of “ownership” it has become “our tree” in a sense neither of us would have anticipated.

We took my sister to the “Ruheberg” and showed it to her, then our oldest daughter Katrin and her husband Martin, then her younger sister Nina and Joe, the friend she lives with. All five of them, one after the other, took in attentively what they saw, thought and talked about it, and then decided to eventually join us in the circle of urns under the red beech when their time comes. A few weeks ago their names were entered in the “Ruheberg”-file of the Oberried townhall. Amazing, the miracles “our tree” seems to be able to work. For example, making my heart smile, even posthumously. §