Hermann Löns

His parents were Friedrich Wilhelm Löns (1832–1908) from Bochum, a teacher, and Klara (née Cramer; 1844–96) from Paderborn.

Hermann Löns grew up in Deutsch-Krone (West Prussia).

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.

He was also a hunter, naturalist and conservationist.

Despite being well over the normal recruitment age, Löns enlisted and was killed in World War I and his purported remains were later used by the German government for celebratory purposes.

Hermann Löns was born on 29 August 1866 in Kulm (now Chełmno, Poland) in the Province of Prussia.

He was one of twelve siblings, of whom five died early.

A number of his poems from Der kleine Rosengarten were set to music by Franz Gabriel [1883-1929] in 1927-8 and published in an album with a dedication to the tenor, Richard Tauber, who recorded 13 of them for Odeon in August 1928.

In 1884, the family relocated back to Westfalen as his father found a position in Münster.

A sickly child who survived typhus, Löns graduated from school on his second try with the Abitur in 1886.

Urged by his father, he began to attend courses at Münster university in preparation for studying medicine.

In 1887, he started his studies at the University of Greifswald.

There he joined a dueling fraternity (Turnerschaft Cimbria), but was dismissed cum infamia (with infamy).

In November 1888, Löns relocated to the university of Göttingen, but returned to Münster without having attained a degree.

In fact, he never even enrolled at Göttingen but joined a drinking society called the Club der Bewusstlosen.

At Münster he studied natural sciences emphasizing zoology at the Theologische und Philosophische Akademie from the spring of 1889 to autumn 1890.

While there, he developed interests in environmental issues – protecting nature from damage by industrial activity – and in literature.

However, he was also arrested in 1889 for disorderly conduct and sentenced to five days in jail for extinguishing gas lights and resisting arrest while drunk.

In the autumn of 1891, Löns decided to quit university without graduating and to become a journalist.

He went first to Kaiserslautern, where he worked for the newspaper Pfälzische Presse.

He was dismissed after five months for being late and for being drunk.

Löns then went to Gera where he again became an assistant editor, this time for the Reußische Volkszeitung.

He also lost that job after three weeks, again for being drunk.

Löns then started work as a freelance reporter for the Hannoveraner Anzeiger.

From 1892, Löns lived in Hanover and as a regional news editor wrote about a wide variety of subjects.

Some of his writings with the pseudonym "Fritz von der Leine" were collected as a book Ausgewählte Werke von Fritz von der Leine, published in 1902.

The year before, Löns had published a collection of poetry and a book of short stories on hunting.

In 1902, Löns quit the newspaper and co-founded the rival newspaper Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung.

In April 1903, he became its editor-in-chief, but by February 1904 the newspaper folded due to a lack of funds.

Löns then joined the Hannoversches Tagblatt, writing as "Ulenspeigel".

It was at this time that Löns began to make a name for himself as a writer on nature, in particular on the heaths of Lower Saxony (Heidedichter).

In 1906, he published these writings in Mein braunes Buch which became his first literary success.

Löns became editor-in-chief of the newspaper Schaumburg-Lippische Landeszeitung of Bückeburg in 1907, and remained in this position through April 1909.

Once again, alcohol consumption was the cause of his dismissal.

Freed from the need to do regular work as a newspaper man, Löns wrote and published several more of his works in 1909, emphasizing animal studies and characterization, including the popular Mümmelmann.

That same year, he wrote three more novels, two of which were published in 1910, including Der Wehrwolf, his most successful book, depicting the bloody revenge of Lower Saxony peasants against marauding soldiers of the Thirty Years War.

The poems contained in the collection Der kleine Rosengarten (1911) were referred to by Löns as "folk songs" (Volkslieder).

They included the Matrosenlied ("Sailors' Song") with the chorus Denn wir fahren gegen Engelland ("For we are sailing against England"), which was put to music by Herms Niel and became one of the most-sung German military songs of World War II.