Abstract

"Business for the Common Good? Conflicts over Municipal and Non-Profit Funeral Businesses in Twentieth Century Germany"

Jan Logemann, Göttingen University (jan.logemann@wiwi.uni-goettingen.de)

The market for funeral businesses and burial insurance struggled for legitimacy across Western countries throughout much of the Twentieth Century. In many countries, municipal and non-profit organizations emerged to challenge commercial funeral homes. Private funeral homes, meanwhile, learned to make their own arguments about what it meant to do business “in the public interest.”
Based on business records and on associational and municipal archives, this paper will analyze conflicts over funeral businesses and the possible “socialization” of private funeral homes in interwar and postwar Germany. Beginning in the early 20th Century, many Germany cities strove to make funerals a public service akin to health services or public utilities. At the same time, non-profit burial associations gained in membership and significance, offering especially working-class Germans an affordable alternative to a private market they described as marred by profiteering and immoral business practices.
Faced with the credible threat of elimination from the market, funeral businesses and their associations attempted to re-fashion themselves as champions of the common good. This included the introduction and enforcement of professional and ethical standards in their business. It also entailed the invention of a new moral code of piety - a code, they claimed, best served by traditional family businesses rooted within the community. While public and non-profit enterprises continued to play a role in this funeral market into the postwar period, private funeral businesses succeeded in blunting the threat of municipal take-over and for many decades established a highly organized, largely non-competitive market for funeral services.
The appeal to some form of social responsibility, the funeral markets show, has a long history. Especially in sectors and services - from health to housing – which catered to basic needs and were highly morally charged, businesses early on learned to embrace narratives of service to the common good.