For a funeral speaker there are two things to consider. Firstly, despite the occasion, you have to make the audience laugh. Secondly, you should take a crumpled sheet of paper with you to the desk. When your voice breaks and tears come, look at the ball of paper and pretend it’s dog poop. This helps!
The tips come from Wolf Schneider, the language critic, journalist and former director of the Henri Nannen School (1979-1995), who died on November 11 at the age of 97. Schneider was buried in the Starnberg Forest Cemetery on Monday. Schneider’s granddaughter reports on the advice for the funeral speech in her speech, with the paper ball in front of her. When the passage with the dog shit comes, Schneider’s first requirement is met: the people in the funeral home laugh.
The funeral is like a class reunion
About 60 mourners came on Monday to say goodbye to Wolf Schneider. Not all fit in the funeral parlor, a few have to stay outside. Inside is the coffin, a bouquet of flowers on it, red, yellow, violet the flowers, a bit of color between all the black in the room. A funeral speaker speaks, not a clergyman, Schneider had little to do with the church. “It’s the encounters with people that make our lives worth living,” he says. And Schneider has given many people such encounters. Memories that are still in our heads after years and decades.
Many of his former journalistic apprentices attended the funeral service.
(Photo: Franz Xaver Fuchs)
For example at the parties where the passionate dancer Schneider turned up the music and poured out champagne. Or the letter in which Schneider sent a former student his congratulations on her wedding – along with the note that he wished him more luck “than can be expected based on statistical probability. Be hugged!” In addition to his professional competence and his slightly quirky sense of humor, it was this warmth that many of his students appreciated so much about Schneider. Some of them, who are no longer apprentices but editors-in-chief or department heads, are standing at the grave of their former teacher on Monday. A small Henri Nannen school reunion, they all once sat in Schneider’s class in Hamburg.
“He always kept his word,” says the son
Schneider’s family sits in the front row. He had four children, his son Curt, the puzzle maker CUS, died in a mountain accident a few weeks ago. His father was a “Prussian general,” says Schneider’s son Horst. But also someone whose care could be relied upon. “He always kept his word,” says the son about the father.
Wolf Schneider, a master of the German language and trainer of numerous journalists, will be buried on November 21, 2022 in the Starnberg Forest Cemetery.
(Photo: Franz Xaver Fuchs)
Speaking of words, language was Schneider’s passion. The journalist Petra Reski reports that it wasn’t just about tapeworm sentences and meaningless adjectives: “He wanted us to think more clearly.” Clear language, clear thoughts. He valued attitude and ethos in journalism – messages that his students have internalized. Even today she feels Schneider’s “touch on her neck” with every sentence, says Reski.
After the speeches, three men and a woman, wearing black cloaks and peaked caps, come into the mourning hall, seize the coffin and carry it out to the grave. The death knells are ringing.
Wolf Schneider is no longer there. But his writings, contributions to debates and memories of him remain. Its principles have been passed down from one generation of journalists to the next.
In his last years, Schneider was probably a bit afraid of slipping into insignificance. It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anytime soon. An example of this: the paper ball at his funeral.