Death and Self-Promotion

The Cemetery as Medium of Middle Class Representation during the Kulturkampf in Dornbirn

Abstract

Constructing representative monuments with corresponding legends the cemetery was for the middle classes a place to show wealth, power and taste to the public. In Dornbirn the prerequisite for this habitus was the erection of so-called camposanti, rectangular cemeteries surrounded with arcades. Just as important was the decision of the municipal council to sell the burial-places under the arcades to rich citizens, who founded there family-tombs. The Kulturkampf did not stop outside the gates of the cemeteries and brought politics inside the consecrated area. Although the liberal dominated municipal council negotiated together with ecclesiastical representatives regulations for the cemeteries, the conservative papers attacked this attempt of co-operation. So the cemeteries in Dornbirn mean more than just the amount of their graves. Actually they are apart of their function as places for funerals symbols: a symbol for the aspiring middle classes, who created representative monuments on this place of eternal remembrance as well as a symbol for the argument between the secularised state with his liberal government and the more and more political and social relevance loosing catholic church.