Cemeteries in Europe as places of remembrance and memory landscapes

Abstract

European cemeteries have been places of remembrance for centuries. With their spatial structure, their sepulchral monuments and buildings, they report on the changing ways of dealing with the deceased. The burial sites give a materialized expression to the feeling of mourning, the change of which in the course of history is able to show the manifold interrelationships between death, society and memory. They store biographies, mentalities, ideologies, gender relations, social structures and hierarchies as well as regional historical specifics. Cemeteries are classical memory landscapes, as will be explained using the example of European cemeteries in the bourgeois era –also under political aspects–, military cemeteries and special maritime cemeteries of the North Sea coast.

Keywords

• Cemetery, funeral culture, memory landscape, place of remembrance, burial site