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Preparation for a live broadcast of a funeral
Photo: Thomas Kronsteiner / Getty Images
The picture was good.
Nothing stuttered, even over such a great distance.
Julia Heffter saw her relatives in the mourning hall in Hamburg, all the flowers and wreaths, the ribbons with the last greetings.
She saw her cousin read the speech Heffter had written.
And how her relatives went from the funeral hall to the grave, her brother let the urn slide into the earth, the relatives threw rose petals.
That's how she describes it today.
Julia Heffter, 52, was sitting on her sofa in Nelson, New Zealand, 11,000 miles and twelve time zones away when her father was buried.
She watched the funeral on her television.
Because of the lockdown, Heffter was not allowed to leave the country in May 2020.
So she had been looking for a way how she could still be at the funeral service.
"I had to be able to lock," she says.
With the help of her brother Jan, she found a funeral home that held the funeral.
For Christopher Kleinert, 24, it was the first funeral service that he streamed over the Internet.
"I was pretty nervous," says the undertaker from Hamburg.
He was afraid that the relatives of the deceased might feel disturbed in their grief.
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