Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Felix Schulz
Full text for this publication is not currently held within this repository. Alternative links are provided below where available.
Abstract for the Chapter: With few exceptions the German cemetery before 1870 had been a space dominated by individual and family graves. The subsequent experience of social change, caused by industrialisation and urbanisation, as well as by the major conflicts in the twentieth century, was accompanied by a number of transformations in the German cemetery landscape. Many cemeteries, especially urban ones, saw a shift in the use of space and a perceptible increase in public commemoration. This chapter looks at the visual culture of death in East Germany after 1945 by looking at sites of individual and collective burial and in particular the most quintessential socialist element of sepulchral culture, the Urnengemeinschaftsanlage (anonymous communal area for the internment of urns or UGA). UGAs will be shown to represent fascinating spaces physically apart from the traditional family and individual grave plots that are characterised by their own culture of visualising death and commemoration. This chapter analyses their design and iconography in order to demonstrate how they wrestled with problems such as sacrosanctity and how, between the strong currents of secularisation, modernisation, and a clear ideological thanatology, they addressed the issue of death and commemoration in a modern socialist country.
Author(s): Schulz FR
Editor(s): Aaron, M.
Publication type: Book Chapter
Publication status: Published
Book Title: Envisaging Death: Visual Culture and Dying
Year: 2013
Pages: 10-25
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
ISBN: 9781443849265
