| Until the 1870s, disposing of dead bodies by fire was illegal in Germany. With the aim of examining attitudes toward mortality during the German Empire and the Weimar Republic, this social and cultural history of cremation traces the formation of a reform movement that campaigned in the name of cultural progress, reason, and individual rights to introduce an alternative to earth burial. State governments, which were concerned about the administration of criminal justice and the public good, as well as the Protestant and the Catholic churches, which objected to the burning of corpses as a pagan custom, opposed the efforts of educated middle-class reformers until the First World War. With the increased participation of the working classes and the utilization of cremation for ideological purposes, the movement diversified in the 1920s. The Imperial Law on Cremation, which granted equal status to cremation and interment in 1934, and the Nazi Gleichschaltung led to the dissolution of cremationism.;Investigating metaphysical ideas and funerary practices, as well as legal regulations and political conflict, this dissertation draws from a variety of quantitative and qualitative sources, which range from poems and cremationist journals to parliamentary debates and municipal statistics. Case studies of the cities of Bremen, Berlin, Cologne, and Munich do justice to the diversity of a grass roots movement. A semantic analysis suggests that the root metaphor of the cycle dominated cremationist discourse and that fiery images represented warmth, light, and movement, which in turn signified a process of ennobling purification and liberation.;My dissertation contests the assumption that modernity implies the repression and denial of mortality. Cremationists did not fear death. They viewed it as a form of spiritual homecoming and abstract union with the universal. Although they abandoned the Christian notion of death as sleep, only a minority of cremationists were freemasons. At the core of the conflict over burial reform stood disagreements between conservatives and progressives over the pace and nature of historical change. This study contributes to the history of the body, inner nation-building, liberalism, and the Burgertum in Germany. It also challenges the grand narratives of secularization and rationalization. |
