Death, mourning and legacy: What changes through digitality?

Death poses great challenges to each and every individual. Whether it is to understand and accept one’s own mortality or to integrate the death of an important, perhaps beloved person into one’s own continued life. Just as digitalisation is changing our lives, it adds new dimensions to the end of our life. On a practical level, tasks arise in the care of estates, which raise their own technical, legal and also ethical questions through online accounts, identities on the net and digital communication traces. But mourning and remembrance are also seeking and finding new – also more individual – ways of expression in digital spaces by expanding the physical places, temporal boundaries and established patterns of our rituals.

Stephan Neuser is Secretary General of the Bundesverband Deutscher Bestatter e. V. and a lawyer. He experiences on a daily basis the changes that digitality brings to the way people deal with death. In this episode of Digitalgespräch, the expert provides insights into new possibilities, requirements and needs that are leading to a change in funeral culture and answers questions about the digital estate. With hosts Marlene Görger and Petra Gehring, he discusses digital forms of mourning and remembrance culture, how they tie in with existing practices and motifs – complementing or reinterpreting them – and what significance the “analogue” retains in the process or also: acquires anew.

Further informationen:

Webseite of Deutscher Bestatter e. V.