To get in the proper frame of mind for Halloween, this chilly, sunny October morning I made my way to the Grinzing Friedhof. Friedhof, which means "place of peace" (cemetery), is one of the few euphemisms I have come across in German. This culture strikes me as matter-of-fact in so many ways, particularly when it comes to nudity or death or other subjects that make Americans shy, uneasy, or circumspect. (The word for mortuary, for example, translates as "corpse house.") The Grinzing cemetery sits at the edge of the village, on a hilltop--a good place, as hilltops are where heaven and earth meet. The composer Gustav Mahler, I have read, is buried here. I used a quest for his grave as my reason to thrash along the sidewalks through the dead leaves and up the slope.
There is a practicality about the business of burial here. Adjacent to the entrance gate are a pair of florist shops, and next to one of them is the entry to a stonemason's yard. The florists offer all manner of evergreen twigs and branches, along with chrysanthemums, pansies, and other flowers that are resistant to cold weather. These florists' business, it appears, is to assist with grave decoration rather than to provide displays for funerals. Neither the florists nor the stonemason hides discreetly in the shadows or seeks at all to be unobtrusive. Out front, like a menu board for a cafe, the mason has placed a sign with your three basic tombstone prices, ranging from roughly $1000 to $3000. Your basic one is your plain granite and comes in at 950 euros, and your high-end one at 2,200 euros is your black marble, polishing included free gratis. I looked into the graveled yard expecting to see a mock-up sample, with (in German, of course) "Your Name Here"--and perhaps a dash below it sandwiched by question marks--to whet the appetite of buyers, or at least to put passersby in a suitable frame of mind before entering the gates.
The cemetery has more the feel of a farm than of a garden. Just inside the gate is a modest little building, a bit shabby, reminding me of an adjunct to a barn. Its doors were open, and inside was a small chapel, rough and plain, with nine wooden folding chairs set in three rows on a stone floor, a lectern, and a bier on wheels, very like a shopping cart at a Home Depot garden center, though higher, and covered with ratty green felt. On the gravel paths I saw workmen in coveralls raking up leaves and other natural debris. At the ends of some of the rows of graves are concrete bins where grave decorations--flowers, boughs, and other vegetation--are tossed by the workmen as unceremoniously as children discarding candy wrappers on Halloween night. Three or four times during my stroll I had to step aside for these dusty, jeans-clad lieutenants of Death, who rolled through on garden tractors towing wooden-bed carts suitable for hauling a coffin or a pile of dead branches. They looked with annoyance at me and, I thought, at all us visitors, the solitary as well as the family groups, passing us like obese shoppers on scooters in a rush to get to the paint sale in Aisle 6. Because of a mild allergy to autumn leaf mold, I occasionally dabbed at tears under my eyes, hoping they would mistake it for grief and soften a bit as they rumbled past, but they remained as oblivious as a Vienna taxi driver to a crippled pedestrian in a crosswalk.
The cemetery blankets perhaps 5 acres. Along its edges, behind tumble-down wooden fences, are sheds for backhoes and other motorized, miniature farm equipment, along with shovels, piles of brown dirt, and a variety of gardening tools. Many of the marble vaults are decorated with flowers, but real, not plastic ones. There are no balloons, no pinwheels, and none of the tacky decoration that shows up in cemeteries in the States. Not many trees rise in the tract, and those that do look sad. Along with a few birch are traditional evergreens, cypress and pine; like the pine, the birch have been pruned high, presumably so their branches would not interfere with the backhoe operator's work. The cypress are particularly ragged, with wide gaps in their foliage, as if other trees had toppled into them, revealing wide and dark, brown, tangled interiors. These trees rose above a forest of mostly black marble slate, stones sometimes several feet high to accommodate the names of three or more generations, as families are interred in vertical stacks.
Here the old is embedded in the new. I did not find any dates before mid-19th century in the lists above the vaults, and most of the stones dated from the last 50 years. It occurred to me that the reason I saw so few old, weathered stones is that they are replaced--and updated, literally--each time a member of the most recent generation is interred. Still, I know that Grinzing has been here for several hundred years and must assume there is yet another cemetery, or perhaps those who died in the early 19th century and before are interred under church floors if not in other yards.
Contributing to the matter-of-fact feel here is that most of the stones are minimally informative--nothing but names and dates of birth and death. There are no Bible verses or Biblical images such as angels or stone lambs, though crosses are in abundance. Only a very few show signs of whimsicality. I saw two marble crosses with "Wiedersehen!" engraved on the transept, and another with "Unvergesslich!" (Unforgettable!); one black stone had a picture of a dog, perhaps a rottweiler, etched into it, and just below were the words, "I am here, I wait for you." I did notice that the World War II years, especially 1943-45, showed up frequently. Some of these were on stones of persons middle-aged and older, who died in Vienna, as that of a husband and wife with the same date of death, but some had died in their teens and 20s. In many cases, their professions had been military, designated by the Maltese cross next to the name. One of these young men is noted as having belonged to the Luftwaffe. Another says "Our Only Son"; he died on the Russian front in the winter ("Gefallt Donez 1943") at the age of 18 and is buried below his parents, who lived into the 1960s. How unnatural it seemed to think of combatants in Hitler's forces as having also been human, of their ends as having been sad, of their short lives as having been unfulfilled, and even of their having left behind parents, parents who grieved.
Some cemeteries are well-tended gardens, but I most appreciate the ones that are tended just imperfectly enough to reflect the passage of time. Rome would not be so calming to the spirit if it had no ruins. I appreciate a few clumps of overgrown grass and a few weeds, a burial yard in which the stones are weathered in different stages, with the oldest illegible from lichen and erosion by winds and rain over centuries. I never did locate the grave of Gustav Mahler.
Filler
A number of the wine gardens and inns in lower Grinzing have signs on their exteriors saying that they have been in business since 1683--the date of the last Turkish siege, in which Grinzing was burned to the ground.
I have seen no Halloween decorations here other than a child-sized scarecrow that sits out front of a flower shop and is taken in each night. Pumpkins, however, are now popular on menus: pumpkin-seed oil salad dressing, baked pumpkin, pumpkin soup.... And geese are abundant on restaurant menus and in grocery stores.
There is a practicality about the business of burial here. Adjacent to the entrance gate are a pair of florist shops, and next to one of them is the entry to a stonemason's yard. The florists offer all manner of evergreen twigs and branches, along with chrysanthemums, pansies, and other flowers that are resistant to cold weather. These florists' business, it appears, is to assist with grave decoration rather than to provide displays for funerals. Neither the florists nor the stonemason hides discreetly in the shadows or seeks at all to be unobtrusive. Out front, like a menu board for a cafe, the mason has placed a sign with your three basic tombstone prices, ranging from roughly $1000 to $3000. Your basic one is your plain granite and comes in at 950 euros, and your high-end one at 2,200 euros is your black marble, polishing included free gratis. I looked into the graveled yard expecting to see a mock-up sample, with (in German, of course) "Your Name Here"--and perhaps a dash below it sandwiched by question marks--to whet the appetite of buyers, or at least to put passersby in a suitable frame of mind before entering the gates.
The cemetery has more the feel of a farm than of a garden. Just inside the gate is a modest little building, a bit shabby, reminding me of an adjunct to a barn. Its doors were open, and inside was a small chapel, rough and plain, with nine wooden folding chairs set in three rows on a stone floor, a lectern, and a bier on wheels, very like a shopping cart at a Home Depot garden center, though higher, and covered with ratty green felt. On the gravel paths I saw workmen in coveralls raking up leaves and other natural debris. At the ends of some of the rows of graves are concrete bins where grave decorations--flowers, boughs, and other vegetation--are tossed by the workmen as unceremoniously as children discarding candy wrappers on Halloween night. Three or four times during my stroll I had to step aside for these dusty, jeans-clad lieutenants of Death, who rolled through on garden tractors towing wooden-bed carts suitable for hauling a coffin or a pile of dead branches. They looked with annoyance at me and, I thought, at all us visitors, the solitary as well as the family groups, passing us like obese shoppers on scooters in a rush to get to the paint sale in Aisle 6. Because of a mild allergy to autumn leaf mold, I occasionally dabbed at tears under my eyes, hoping they would mistake it for grief and soften a bit as they rumbled past, but they remained as oblivious as a Vienna taxi driver to a crippled pedestrian in a crosswalk.
The cemetery blankets perhaps 5 acres. Along its edges, behind tumble-down wooden fences, are sheds for backhoes and other motorized, miniature farm equipment, along with shovels, piles of brown dirt, and a variety of gardening tools. Many of the marble vaults are decorated with flowers, but real, not plastic ones. There are no balloons, no pinwheels, and none of the tacky decoration that shows up in cemeteries in the States. Not many trees rise in the tract, and those that do look sad. Along with a few birch are traditional evergreens, cypress and pine; like the pine, the birch have been pruned high, presumably so their branches would not interfere with the backhoe operator's work. The cypress are particularly ragged, with wide gaps in their foliage, as if other trees had toppled into them, revealing wide and dark, brown, tangled interiors. These trees rose above a forest of mostly black marble slate, stones sometimes several feet high to accommodate the names of three or more generations, as families are interred in vertical stacks.
Here the old is embedded in the new. I did not find any dates before mid-19th century in the lists above the vaults, and most of the stones dated from the last 50 years. It occurred to me that the reason I saw so few old, weathered stones is that they are replaced--and updated, literally--each time a member of the most recent generation is interred. Still, I know that Grinzing has been here for several hundred years and must assume there is yet another cemetery, or perhaps those who died in the early 19th century and before are interred under church floors if not in other yards.
Contributing to the matter-of-fact feel here is that most of the stones are minimally informative--nothing but names and dates of birth and death. There are no Bible verses or Biblical images such as angels or stone lambs, though crosses are in abundance. Only a very few show signs of whimsicality. I saw two marble crosses with "Wiedersehen!" engraved on the transept, and another with "Unvergesslich!" (Unforgettable!); one black stone had a picture of a dog, perhaps a rottweiler, etched into it, and just below were the words, "I am here, I wait for you." I did notice that the World War II years, especially 1943-45, showed up frequently. Some of these were on stones of persons middle-aged and older, who died in Vienna, as that of a husband and wife with the same date of death, but some had died in their teens and 20s. In many cases, their professions had been military, designated by the Maltese cross next to the name. One of these young men is noted as having belonged to the Luftwaffe. Another says "Our Only Son"; he died on the Russian front in the winter ("Gefallt Donez 1943") at the age of 18 and is buried below his parents, who lived into the 1960s. How unnatural it seemed to think of combatants in Hitler's forces as having also been human, of their ends as having been sad, of their short lives as having been unfulfilled, and even of their having left behind parents, parents who grieved.
Some cemeteries are well-tended gardens, but I most appreciate the ones that are tended just imperfectly enough to reflect the passage of time. Rome would not be so calming to the spirit if it had no ruins. I appreciate a few clumps of overgrown grass and a few weeds, a burial yard in which the stones are weathered in different stages, with the oldest illegible from lichen and erosion by winds and rain over centuries. I never did locate the grave of Gustav Mahler.
Filler
A number of the wine gardens and inns in lower Grinzing have signs on their exteriors saying that they have been in business since 1683--the date of the last Turkish siege, in which Grinzing was burned to the ground.
I have seen no Halloween decorations here other than a child-sized scarecrow that sits out front of a flower shop and is taken in each night. Pumpkins, however, are now popular on menus: pumpkin-seed oil salad dressing, baked pumpkin, pumpkin soup.... And geese are abundant on restaurant menus and in grocery stores.
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