Hermann Löns
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.
His parents were Friedrich Wilhelm Löns (1832–1908) from Bochum, a teacher, and Klara (née Cramer; 1844–96) from Paderborn.
[2] At Münster he studied natural sciences emphasizing zoology at the Theologische und Philosophische Akademie from the spring of 1889 to autumn 1890.
From 1892, Löns lived in Hanover and as a regional news editor wrote about a wide variety of subjects.
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).
The poems contained in the collection Der kleine Rosengarten (1911) were referred to by Löns as "folk songs" (Volkslieder).
[1] 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.
Another of his poems, Das Geheimnis [The Secret], beginning 'Ja, grün ist die Heide', was set to music by Karl Blume and recorded by Tauber in 1932.
Soon after the divorce, Löns had changed his confession from Catholic to Protestant and married Lisa Hausmann (an editorial assistant, born 1871), also at Hanover.
Löns refused to pay alimony and then left without leaving an address, travelling in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands.
[2] In November 1912, he returned to Hanover and subsequently published two more collections of hunting and nature stories Auf der Wildbahn (1912) and Mein buntes Buch (1913), followed by his final novel, Die Häuser von Ohlendorf (1913).
[1] Suffering from bipolar disorder, Löns veered between depression and making fantastic plans for the future.
Löns combined these sentiments, based not least on the Heimatbewegung [de] of the turn of the century (as represented by Adolf Bartels) with an increasingly radical nationalism, the racial concept of an "aristocratic peasantry" (Blood and soil), enmity towards the metropolis (Berlin) and xenophobia.
In October 1934, at the behest of Adolf Hitler, Löns' purported body was exhumed and brought to Germany.
In 1919, several bodies had been exhumed in the vicinity of the area where Löns was killed and transferred to the war cemetery at Luxembourg.
[2] An alternative site near Wilseder Berg was rejected due to concerns about the environmental effect of large numbers of visitors to the grave.
Finding a suitable burial place became an issue for the top echelons of the regime, including Hermann Göring, Rudolf Heß, Joseph Goebbels, Werner von Blomberg and even Adolf Hitler.
On 30 November 1934, members of the Sturmabteilung (SA), apparently on orders from Goebbels, removed the remains from the graveyard chapel in Fallingbostel where they were awaiting reburial.
[7] The 1932 movie Grün ist die Heide (Green Is The Heath) was based on Löns' writings.
