Osman Balkan’s book Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe (2023) provides an original account of a common yet understudied topic—the impact of dying away from home on migrant communities. While we will all die, migrants face greater challenges than most in this regard due to dislocation from country-of-origin burial practices that may not be supported in the host society, differing views on the appropriate repatriation of bodies, and other potential cultural obstacles. The act of dying is a physical, spiritual, and political event that holds implications for the immigration country, the deceased and their loved ones alike. Balkan demonstrates that burial and death practices in migration host societies tell us something deeper about integration policy and its limits.

While the book claims to be about migration in Europe writ large as it relates to death, the focus is Germany, and Berlin in particular. Most of Balkan’s interviews and examples are from within the City State of Berlin, with undertakers, religious clerics, burial experts, and families questioned about their views on the dying process. Muslim migrants, especially those from Turkey, are spotlighted in his research. While there is a scattering of examples from other German cities and European contexts, the empirical focus is Turkish Berliners. This is not a problem because the population is large, and the case provides important insights into many of the issues raised throughout the book. As Balkan, citing Lowe (Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics,1996) notes, Turkish migrants in Berlin are an important group upon which to focus as they can be seen as “foreigners within”—societally understood as enduring outsiders even when they possess German citizenship or long-term residency status, sometimes intergenerationally. However, this focus on Turkish migrants in Berlin should have been clear in the title and preface to the book, which instead suggests a broader ambit.

In Balkan’s words, dead bodies are “concerted sites of political activity over the boundaries of political communities and their foundational values and ideals” (p. 36). He considers this theme across four main empirical chapters focusing on funeral funds and the political economy of repatriation of corpses, undertakers, gravestones and burial practices, and the associated sense of belonging. The ethnographic method involved interviews with bereaved families, government officials, religious leaders, medical practitioners, and Islamic funeral fund administrators, as well as Balkan’s immersive observations undertaken across six Islamic funeral homes in Berlin (p. 19).

In Chapter 2, Balkan considers Muslim undertakers in Berlin and the complex interface of Islamic funerary custom and at times, quite rigid or bureaucratic forms of German burial law (p. 83). He notes at a general level that the work of Muslim undertakers in Germany “becomes politically salient in migratory contexts, where death and end-of-life decisions speak to broader questions about assimilation, integration, identity and belonging” (p. 83). He suggests that such undertakers are in essence “political and cultural intermediaries between minority communities and the German state,” both through socializing immigrants on the norms and values of German society and countering stereotypes about Muslims with the mainstream society (p. 86). The process of minority socialisation includes training in core aspects of German burial practices such as business administration, coffin construction, psychological training in grief counselling, and appreciation of the role played by German bureaucracy in these processes. On the other hand, “the Muslim undertakers offer lessons about Muslim citizens to the German state by countering derogatory stereotypes about Islam and Muslims in Germany” (p. 86). Furthermore, Balkan notes in Chapter 2 examples where reconciliation between different burial perspectives is not simple. For example, the Muslim requirement to bury the body within 48 hours is not easily compatible with the more extenuated requirements of the German bureaucracy, where it can take up to 3 weeks for autopsy and then burial to be approved (p. 124).

In Chapter 3, Balkan “takes the reader on a tour of Berlin’s Islamic burial grounds, exploring different aspects of diasporic funerary culture along the way” (p. 129). This includes analysis of Muslim and Turkish gravestones in German graveyards and their construction featuring Arabic, Turkish, or bilingual text. His analysis also highlights the diversity of gravestones notations of country of birth (records of mobility) and Muslim symbols—obelisks, pyramids, temples, broken and draped columns, urns and sarcophagi, and their religious and cultural significance (p. m167). The chapter also records how some Muslim tombstones use the Muslim Hijri calendar rather than the Gregorian calendar, again representing multicultural deaths or mixed experiences (pp. 157–159). Although the chapter is largely descriptive, it starts with a vignette from a speech at a rally of the Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West (PEDIGA), where concerns were raised by journalist Udo Ulfkotte around Muslim approaches to burial in Germany (pp. 132–133). However, the discriminatory threats to Muslim burial that exist through the rise of the Far Right in Germany is not a theme that is considered more broadly in this chapter or across the book as a whole, despite its escalating relevance to contemporary European politics.

Finally, Chapter 4 considers the politic of belonging and burial. As Balkan notes “[d]eath in migratory settings raises difficult existential questions about the meaning of home and homeland” (p. 174). Burial location is crucial to concepts of identity for migrants. While legal rules around the preservation of bodies may influence when and how they are preserved, this is not, he argues, the main concern driving the attitudes and actions of Turkish migrants. Rather, it is other factors, such as concepts of attachments and ties (p. 177). Aside from this question of the location of burial, there are rules around the ways in which the body is treated after death, with one respondent Balkan interviewed arguing that “German hospitals are ill equipped to serve dying Muslims” (p. 179). As such, this chapter considers rules around body treatment and burial in the German and Islamic traditions, requirements of autopsies under German law, and how these can conflict with both Islamic and Jewish burial procedures. He notes some regulatory changes in Berlin in 2010 to accommodate the burials of religious minorities and outlines the limitations of these reforms. He also documents limitations in training of German nurses over these practices in multicultural Germany, meaning they cannot always provide the right services to families or third parties of minority backgrounds (p. 180).

Key themes emerge in this book that are central to issues of integration in modern Europe in countries that are both multiethnic and aging. Scholars tackling these questions must investigate where the body belongs after one dies; what are the enduring cultural and spiritual legacies around death; what is home during life and at the point of death, and what religious practices demand of migrants and their communities. This is reflected in a quote provided by one interview subject, Yayla, a funeral funder administrator with the Turkish-German community association IGMG. He notes: “Yayla sums up the contradictory position faced by immigrants and their descendants in Europe. They are both ‘foreign’ and ‘here to stay.’ Navigating this liminality is a challenging task, and one which is mirrored in decisions about where and how to be buried” (p. 82). This presents several key questions: What is the relative legal allegiance to each country (sending and receiving) and how does this affect eligibility and entitlements at death? How might we understand these issues in an integrated way across all four of the empirical chapters and what does this mean for our understandings of multiculturalism and belonging over time?

Another theme, raised in Chapter 3 but not explored further is the relationship of minority religious identity (including around) and death practices in Germany to right-wing fundamentalism. The example of PEGIDA’s response to Muslim burial provided above is one example that could have been explored further. It would be interesting to know why such examples, so central to contemporary German politics, were not given greater attention. In addition, Balkan notes that Muslim burial sites have been vandalised across Europe (p. 137). This is a history that finds synergies with the experiences of Jewish graveyards under Nazi Germany. He quotes historian Monica Black, whose book Death in Berlin (2010) recounts that Nazis invested a considerable amount of energy in purging what they perceived to be foreign elements and racial outsiders from German cemeteries. The relationship between these historical racialisation processes around death and contemporary ones would seem to be another potential synergy across the chapters. Like Muslims, Jews also have distinctive burial practices that are historically subject to discrimination. As such, prior processes of Aryanization and “purification” might continue to hold legacies to German approaches to burial.

Despite its title, the book is not comparative, and it would be useful to know why this is was not the case. Chosen examples are from Berlin and Germany, but others are sourced widely across the European continent. This leads the reader to ask whether there are some countries where “multicultural death” (for want of a better term) are more integrated than others. Are there some countries that are performing better in their integration of minority practices around death than others? Or even cities within Germany? What does this in turn tell us about multicultural Europe and death as a social phenomenon more broadly? Comparative design of this kind could have been deployed to generate powerful findings for the readers.