Hermann Löns

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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 spend his school and university times in Münster and Greifswald. Being interested in the biology of the mollusks, he studied medicine and natural sciences. However he did not finish the study, but instead in the 1890s he started to work as a journalist. At the same time he started to write poems, in the 1910s he changed to write 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' life style 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.