The wording in the submission by the Governing Mayor of Berlin is worth considering.
It had been decided not to extend the recognition as an honorary grave for the grave of Oskar Loerkes.
A “lasting memory in the general public” is no longer recognizable.
The state grave maintenance for the final resting place of the writer who died in 1941 will no longer be required.
Protests against it were caused by Loerke's services to German poetry, but also to the publisher S. Fischer, for which he served as a lecturer for almost a quarter of a century, as well as his inner emigration under National Socialism.
You could be successful, because for the governing mayor such a case may not be worth the saved gardening costs in the end.
It seems unlikely that he or any of his officers involved opened a volume of Loerkes to get an idea of who Loerke was.
In such matters it is better to stick to what can be said without knowledge.
The decision for or against the honorary grave also applies to another question: what Loerke is still "for the general public".
What kind of a general public is this?
That, in turn, begs the question of what this general public is all about. You will not want to find them out through a street poll. Otherwise Karsten Witte (film scholar), Edith Schollwer (cabaret artist) and, depending on the street, maybe even Rio Reiser (rock singer), proposed in the same template for graves of honor, would have to fear for a memorial that will survive everywhere. Oh, you hear people say, everyone really knows Rio Reiser.
But there are special people who speak like that. They usually do not live in the depths of the Wittenau or Mahlsdorf districts. And how widespread does the governing mayor consider the memory of Berliners of Emilie Mayer, who is the beneficiary of the honorary grave, outside of musicology? Generality is therefore by no means to be equated with majority. There is no doubt that more people can be mobilized with Reiser records than with Loerke volumes. This would, however, fall into the Rocchigiani trap, because Graziano Rocchigiani currently know even more Berliners, which unfortunately has not yet made his grave in the form of a boxing ring in the St. Matthew Cemetery in Schöneberg a Berlin grave of honor.
That leads back to the poet Loerke. Of all genres of art production, poetry is the one that, at best, can count on a very special public, but hardly ever on a general one. How high are the editions? But that would be the wrong standard. Or should we put it better like this: It would be too despondent approach to the question of the honorary grave. The question cannot be whether Oskar Loerke will get a lingering souvenir from the Berlin city dwellers. The question can only be whether he deserves such a souvenir. Just like with Emilie Mayer. Anyone who has read poems by Oskar Loerke - like the one on this page - will find it difficult to answer this question in the negative.
Which brings us to the crucial point: Does the cultural administration have a relationship to culture? Does she read? Does she trust herself to make judgments that she does not take from the mass media? In other words, it does not matter very much whether the maintenance of Oskar Loerke's grave is financed by the welfare state. This is as unimportant for the effect of his poetry as it is for the interest in his résumé. But for the self-image of a community it makes a difference whether there is respect in it for certain very special, puzzling, but at the same time linguistically rousing achievements. Or whether it doesn't exist. Let's put it this way: if we were king of Germany or even only of Berlin, we should look after Oskar Loerke's grave.