As a welcome, the evangelical jazz combo plays the classic “Guilty”. That fits quite well, after all, the main entrance to the Stadelheim correctional facility is only a few hundred meters away. Nevertheless, the reason for the small musical interlude, which the quartet from the parishes of Sophie Scholl and Oberhaching came up with, has nothing to do with the prison. A summer festival is being celebrated here, and at what is admittedly a somewhat unusual place: the cemetery at Perlacher Forst.
To be more precise: to the left of the cemetery’s large funeral parlor, by a blue trailer on a meadow. There is the Café Himmelb(l)au, which in turn is more of a social initiative than a gastronomic establishment. For the past nine weeks, people have been meeting here on Sundays between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. Five evangelical parishes from the area – Jesaia, Luther, Sophie Scholl, Emmaus and Philippus – set up tables and chairs with full-time staff and volunteers and provide food and drink from the site trailer. Coffee and cake are free of charge, because here a casual exchange of cemetery visitors should be possible.
“A cemetery does not have to be a dead place,” says Munich health officer Beatrix Zurek (SPD), who came to the summer festival, and then reports that the first complaint to the city administration was received before the opening in May, “that something like this not work in a cemetery”. According to Zurek, cemeteries are also meeting places, not just places of mourning. The idea for the summer café came from her employee Heino Jahn, head of the municipal cemeteries and burials, and Pastor Karsten Schaller, head of the evangelical service center “Segen”.
In the café, mourners should find their way back to life
The third mayor, Verena Dietl (SPD), said in her speech that it was “a wonderful project”. The café offers “space and framework that brings us together again”, especially after phases of farewell and mourning. The Protestant city dean Bernhard Liess also said that cemeteries are more than places of mourning: “Here one should be able to find one’s way back to life.” Church must also go into society with such offers, he said, they must offer “strengthening for body and soul”.
The five communities have condensed this into the concise slogan: “Coffee, cake, ratchet”. The fact that this offer met with a “fantastic response” (Dietl) can be seen from the statistics: in the past nine weeks, the full-time and volunteers have given away more than 800 pieces of cake. And of course baked it by hand beforehand.