“Afraid, I’m not afraid, not of quitting, because I won’t quit!” Rosa Wegscheider was the undisputed queen of the Waging cemetery. Because the resolute woman never really stopped working. Not at 70, at 80, at 90. If she hadn’t died last year at the age of 90, she would probably have celebrated her 70th anniversary as the only female gravedigger in Germany next December.
“The Smell of Earth” is the name of the book by Christiane Tramitz, in which the bestselling author tells the story of Rosa Wegscheider’s “simple, rich life” and introduces us to an extraordinary woman to whom the word personality really applies. The gravedigger, who worked her way up to become a successful undertaker over the years, was certainly not an easy person, she saw herself as a “boss, yesterday, today and tomorrow”. She could be as headstrong and stubborn as she was humble and hardworking all her life. Diligence was the number one priority in their value system.
The book certainly takes a few liberties, exaggerates. Ultimately, however, it is based on conversations that Tramitz had during his lifetime with Rosa herself, her daughter, her son-in-law Max and her nephew Gustl, among others. Gustl, who is called Wastl in the book, toiled side by side with the Wegscheiderin for decades for the family business and provided numerous anecdotes that are second to none and contribute significantly to the reading pleasure.
To contradict her was almost impossible
So it happened again and again that tourists who had died while on vacation in Waging am See had to be transferred. For example to Berlin. Wastl also wanted to take the opportunity to see the city, which Rosa denied him with the argument that Berlin was well known from television. Just as ludicrous: She supposedly knew that her former neighbor had owned the “Zeppelin Hindenburg”. Objections that he had only flown once were fended off with a clever question: “Were you there?”
The many stories that loosen up the biographical retelling of Rosa’s life make it clear that contradicting her was almost hopeless. Either she knew better, just kept grumbling, or put on a swipe. It’s an honest book that doesn’t sugarcoat anything and for that very reason it’s a well-deserved homage to a woman who went her own way.
“The Smell of Earth” is also the story of an emancipation. Rosa grows up on the Zözenhof in circumstances full of deprivation. She experiences the men as strong, the women, especially her tearful mother, as weak. The deeply believing Rosa wants to be different and is different. She is the greatest help for her father, a cattle dealer, which prompts him to burden her with even more work. She stands barefoot in the barn and in the field, herding the cattle together in wind and weather. Lessons that make her hard on herself and later on her own daughter.
With increasing life experience, she realizes that a lot of men are no good
With increasing life experience, she realizes that many men are worthless and that they are in fact the weaker sex. Sayings like “Keep going with the men, they’re worth nothing” and “Most of them are good for nothing, can’t work. Just like us women” run like a red thread through the book. But there was one exception: Rosa’s happy husband Anderl.
She admired the 17-year-old from Ödhof as a child. When he came home from the Second World War after six years, she fell in love with him and in 1948 they got married against all odds. The two fought for their future until they were offered the position of drunken gravedigger in the early 1950s. Your chance, which you took. In the beginning they picked up the dead with handcarts, but later they can afford bigger and bigger cars. And when Anderl became weaker over the years due to the war injuries he had suffered, Rosa, with her flowered overall and rubber boots, became “sole ruler of the graveyard”.
Christiane Tramitz, “The smell of earth. The simple rich life of Waging’s gravedigger”, Ludwig Verlag, Munich 2022. 256 pages. 22 euros.