Hermann Löns

Hermann Löns (August 29 1866 – September 26 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.

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 - despite the fact that Löns' lifestyle didn't match the Nazi ideals. On request of Adolf Hitler Löns was exhumed and reburied in the Lüneburg Heath near the city Walsrode.

Löns is well known in Germany for his famous folksongs.

External links

* [http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/loens/wehrwolf/wehrwolf.htm "Der Wehrwolf" in German at Projekt Gutenberg]