Hermann Löns

Löns, Hermann (Kulm, West Prussia, 1866-1914, nr. Reims, killed in action), is generally known as the poet of the Lüneburg Heath (see Lüneburger Heide), though he was born in a Prussian province, which is now part of Poland. He spent part of his boyhood in Westphalia, and was from 1893 to 1907 a journalist in Hanover, then for a short time in Bückeburg. In spite of his age of almost 48 he volunteered at the outbreak of war and fell in the first weeks. He was a great walker, an acute and practised observer of nature and an ardent shooter of game. He wrote many sketches and stories of heath, forest, and wild life, including Mein grünes Buch (1901), Was da kreucht und fleugt, Aus Wald und Heide, and Mümmelmann (all 1909). As a novelist he belonged to the trend of Heimatkunst, writing of a specific region with a nationalistic bias.

Löns's principal novel, Der Wehrwolf (1910), is a historical story full of violence and atrocities. It is set in the Thirty Years War (see Dreissigjähriger Krieg) and recounts the efforts of Harm Wulf (Der Wehrwolf) of Oedringen in the Lüneburger Heide and of his fellow heath farmers and labourers to protect and, where necessary, avenge their families and property against marauding soldiery. Other novels by Löns are Der letzte Hansbur (1909), Dahinten in der Heide (1910), Das zweite Gesicht (1911), and Die Häuser von Olenhof (posth., 1917). His lyric poetry (Mein goldenes Buch, 1901; Der kleine Rosengarten, 1911) does not rise above mediocrity, but has sometimes a folk-song-like character, and some of his poems are sung as Volkslieder.

Sämtliche Werke (8 vols.), ed. F. Castelle, appeared 1924 and Nachgelassene Schriften (2 vols.), ed. W. Deimann, 1928. Löns's (rediscovered) war diary appeared as Leben ist Sterben, Werden, Verderben, ed. K.-H. Janßen and G. Stein, in 1986.

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Hermann Löns (29 August 1866 – 26 September 1914) was a German journalist and writer. He is most famous as "The Poet of the Heath" for his novels and poems celebrating the people and landscape of the North German moors, particularly the Lüneburg Heath in Lower Saxony. Löns is well known in Germany for his famous folksongs.

Life

Born in Kulm in West Prussia, he spent his school and university times in Münster and Greifswald. Interested in the biology of the mollusks, he studied medicine and the natural sciences. However, he did not finish, but instead started to work as a journalist in the 1890s, when he began writing poems. In the 1910s he changed to short stories and novels. Inspired by pre- and post-Christian folklore and history, his most famous novel is Der Wehrwolf (The Warwolf - 1910), an alternately heart-warming and heart-rending chronicle of a North German farming community suffering tragedies and ultimate triumph during the harrowing period of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648).

At the age of 48 he volunteered for service in the German Army in the First World War, and was shot dead during a patrol at Loivre in France just three weeks after joining the army. As in some of his writings he showed nationalistic ideas he was later considered by the Nazis as one of their writers - as parts of his works fit well within the 'Blood and Soil' ethos of National Socialism, with National Socialist ideologues such as Walther Darre and Alfred Rosenberg lauding the peasantry and small rural communities as the true lifeblood of the German nation. On request of Adolf Hitler Löns was exhumed and reburied in the Lüneburg Heath near the city of Walsrode.

Bibliography

• Der Letzte Hansbur (1909)
• Der Wehrwolf (1910)

External links

• Der Wehrwolf in German at Projekt Gutenberg

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