Where to put all that grief?

A Project of the Study Group Cemetery and Monument (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Friedhof und Denkmal e. V.)
and Ernst Strassacker GmbH & Co. KG

The Study Group Cemetery and Monument demands social change:

Grief Needs Appreciation and New Freedom

Every year almost one million people die in Germany (954,874 in 2018 according to the Federal Statistical Office), leaving behind several million grieving survivors. But does society still support and accompany mourners properly? Only if we recognise, understand and appreciate their needs can we enable them to find the best way out of their difficult phase of life. And these needs have changed: According to the latest studies, healing grief requires above all individual rituals, such as those often not (yet) permitted in cemeteries.

The Study Group Cemetery and Monument therefore demands, also in the face of increasing private competition, that the cemetery be renewed as the still most important place for coping with grief. Only in this way can grief become unencumbered memory. Because even modern, often anonymous variants of burial do not offer optimal conditions for this. These are the findings of two scientifically sound studies by trend researcher Matthias Horx and sociologists Dr. Thorsten Benkel and Matthias Meitzler.