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 innate nor intuitive. Rules governing burial rites in mid-century Germany turn out to be stubbornly based in confessional practices, which resisted, adapted, and absorbed new political and social developments. Black acknowledges significant disparities between Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish traditions, while also noting that these differences reflected many shared, German beliefs about death and the dead. Religious institutions and their leaders thus played key roles in maintaining and shaping attitudes about death; the family served as an extension of confessional instruction.

Black's analysis is persuasive in part because of her respect for the dead and their survivors. Her careful use of myriad sources lends her argument a texture and nuance that permit her to analyze death and burial without judgment. She gently guides the reader through the labyrinth of death rituals—albeit as an omnipresent narrator whose first-person voice is occasionally distracting—and demonstrates that polemics have no room in this subject. It is no easy task to write about death in Germany without focusing primarily on the horrors of the Holocaust. Black asks us to include the Holocaust as a part of German history that is not separate from it.

Repeatedly, appeals to history, tradition, and ethical considerations helped to maintain a consistency in burial rituals even as they accommodated new conditions. Black's examples, including practical considerations and individual sentiment, point to new avenues for historical research. Motorized hearses, for instance, did not necessarily signify technological progress. Many families, in the absence of a corpse, did not hold funerals or memorial services for missing parents, siblings, and children even years after World War II; attempts to declare death a (masculine) national sacrifice alienated those Germans whose family members died of causes unrelated to wartime battles. Finally, the division of Germany separated not only living family members and friends, but also the living from those dead whose graves lay on the other side of the Berlin Wall.

Black also recasts women's history. Women appear consistently as unassailable authorities over burial practices. Certainly, the disproportionate number of women in German society throughout this period left them with the responsibility for burying the dead. Part of their power, however, stemmed from traditional, often religiously based, female roles in taking care of corpses—which brings the narrative back to the question of how a younger generation learns about rituals concerning death and dying.

Black missed an opportunity to discuss the teaching of young people about death by ignoring schools. A single sentence dismisses scholarship on educational reforms in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as overlooking death and dying (pp. 187–188). If religious institutions figured heavily into Germans' understanding of death and dying, however, then the highly charged issue of religious instruction in school curricula would have enhanced, and perhaps complicated, Black's argument. From Weimar-era experimental, secular schools; to Nazi schools' elimination of religious instruction; to the bitter education debates in postwar Germany (West Germany reintroduced religious instruction in schools, while East Germany kept it out), Germany's youth also learned about the meaning of life and death in schools.

In this absorbing study, death becomes a social institution unto itself. By including the dead in the history of Germany, Black provides a compelling history of the living. With this contribution to scholarship on death and dying, Black establishes death, dying, and burial practices as part of the history of mentalities in both the short and longue durée.