Hermann Löns
Hermann Löns (1866 – 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. He was also a hunter, natural historian and conservationist.
[edit] Life
Löns was born in Kulm in West Prussia on 29 August 1866 and went to school and university in Münster and Greifswald. Interested in the biology of molluscs, he studied medicine and natural science. However, he did not finish his studies, but started to work as a journalist instead during 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, the word being a play on 'Werwolf', the German word for Werewolf), 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 on 26 September 1914 whilst on patrol at Loivre near Reims in France just three weeks after enlisting. As in some of his writings he showed nationalistic ideas, he was later considered by the Nazis as one of 'their' writers (despite the fact that Löns' lifestyle didn't match the Nazi ideals), 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. At the behest of Adolf Hitler, Löns' body was exhumed and reburied in the Lüneburg Heath near the town of Walsrode.
[edit] Bibliography
- Der Letzte Hansbur (1909)
- Der Wehrwolf (1910)
- The Warwolf: A Peasant Chronicle of the Thirty Years War (2006) ISBN13: 9781594160264
