German Radio Station Offers Funeral Giveaway

Picture it:  you’re young, you’re hip, you’re German. You and your friends have the world by the tail, smoking cigarettes in the Altstadt, eating “eis”, riding your bikes around Schönbusch Park while sipping a can of Jack and Coke you bought from a vending machine at the natural history museum, dancing till dawn at the diskothek in your electric sunglasses and your neon cycling hats and your acid wash jeans.  You are in the flower of your tender Teutonic life!

One night you and the gang are just hanging out, listening to all the new hit music on Radio Galaxy and playing pinochle for sex. After the latest Taio Cruz jam, deejay Jens Pflueger comes on the air and announces that the station is having an exciting new contest: send in an epitaph you’d like on your headstone, for a chance to win money or your own funeral!  “Wow, totally groovy,” all your friends say, in German.  But will you do it?  Do you have what it takes to write your own epitaph?

Thankfully, we don’t have to merely imagine these things, because in Aschaffenburg, Germany all of this is happening right now.  More than 600 people have entered the contest thus far.  The winner, who will be announced tomorrow, will receive €3000 to be spent on death insurance, which covers funeral expenses when it finally “pays out”. The contest itself is presumably Radio Galaxy’s entry in some sort of meta-contest to see who can create the most German contest ever.

However, not everybody thinks that this decorate-your-own-grave contest is just fun and games.  The radio promotion has been called “tasteless” by an association of undertakers.  That’s right, undertakers.  Guys who make mad cash off of funerals.  They don’t want some kid to win a bunch of money to pay for a funeral.  What the hell is going on here?

To quickly recap: in an effort to foster conversations about death and highlight the importance of death insurance, a youth-oriented radio station is offering youngsters the chance to win their own funeral.  These are the progressives in this story.  On the other side are undertakers, who seem to think that making arrangements to cover funeral expenses – a.k.a. their very livelihood – is somehow immoral.  The German psyche continues to baffle experts everywhere.

Meanwhile, in the United States, undead politicians continue to roam the land.

(Photo from oliworx)

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