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Death, as Monica Black makes clear, is part of life. As such, it is a worthy subject of historical analysis. Mid-twentieth-century Berlin came to know death, mass murder, and unfamiliar, enforced burial practices intimately. Black demonstrates that the persistence and changes in Berliners' rituals surrounding death allow access to a society's cultural and confessional mores, and political and practical developments. Despite death's inevitability, it does not always "kindly stop" to reap souls, nor does it permit survivors to go blissfully about the business of living--Emily Dickinson's serene description notwithstanding (Complete Poems, XXVII, 1924). Against a backdrop of chaos and grief in a city that was center stage for relentless dying, Black brings together the dead and the living to recount a complex tale of life and death in Berlin.
One of the book's themes regards the dissemination of knowledge about social practices: how do individuals and groups know when burial traditions conform or violate accepted norms? Black suggests that most people could answer this question only with a vague shrug of "just knowing." Yet, this knowledge is neither...