Being buried - the German way

When celebrating the lives of their dearly departed, Germans aren't afraid to go big for all eternity. Here, a family enshrines its members at the Stahnsdorf cemetery in Leipzig. With the help of a formidable metal door, living relatives dissuade any would-be plunderers.

Romans who made it to the west side of the Rhine River weren't embarrassed about a post-mortem splurge, either. Cologne sports the best preserved Roman sepulcher anywhere north of the Alps... even if it does happen to lie incongruously between two homes on the busy Aachener Strasse. Roman culture added headstones and sepulchers to pagan German practices of cremation and burial with shrines.

What to do when a graveyard spills over? Plague and cholera forced the city of Oppenheim, Germany to answer just that. They stacked the bones of their dead - 20,000 plus - in an ossuary below St. Michael's Chapel. According to local tour guide Walter Lang, the presence of lime in the shallow graves meant that, "after 30 years, the flesh was gone." While ossuaries were for the common good...

...burial within a chapel was reserved for the spiritually well-connected. German cathedrals and churches are filled with the reposed forms of deceased priests, bishops and archbishops - but also the dukes, princes and kings who protected and promoted the Church's work. St. Mary's, pictured here, was the seat of the Prince-Bishopric of Würzburg in Bavaria for nearly ten centuries.

At just a few centuries old, grass-covered cemeteries with built-to-last headstones are relative newcomers to the popular burial scene in Germany. But in spite of the curved and elegant forms of the headstones pictured, survivors of the deceased do not always have complete artistic license. The preponderance of Christian crosses at this cemetery in Kehl, Baden-Württemberg is a clue...

This tragic burial place is important for what's not pictured: Before this nine-year-old lost his battle to cancer in 2011, the dedicated Borussia Dortmund soccer club fan made it clear he wanted a soccer ball carved into his tombstone. The Catholic cemetery refused; the headstone wouldn't have contained a Christian cross. When public outcry ensued, the cemetery changed its mind.

Not all German cemeteries have such rigid rules and the Catholic Church does not have a say on all graveyards. In Essen, a non-denominational cemetery - one of 60 throughout Germany - welcomes any and all to be buried there and Bosnians and Turks are resting in peace side by side.

Centuries of gravestone tradition haven't stopped Germans from fully embracing the modern. But before you assume that's a cell phone - or "Handy" as Germans refer to them - look closer: this woman passed away in the year 2000. She was likely a fan of the more traditional telephone, itself on a slow march to the graveyard.

There’s even a tombstone for the Deutsche Mark, Germany’s former currency, which was alive from 1948 (in West Germany), or 1990 (in reunified Germany) until 2002, when the euro took over. But as real as the "death" of Deutsche Mark was for some Germans, the grave with its tombstone isn’t real and rather an advertisement for a small headstone company in North Berlin.