Hermann Löns

In 1956, Dieter Borsche featured as Löns in Rot ist die Liebe [de] , a German movie based on Löns' autobiography Das zweite Gesicht.

After 1945, Löns remained a bestselling author. The company that published most of his works estimated that by 1966 they had sold 7.5 million books written by him.

Löns' books continued to sell well after his death. By 1934, they had reached an overall circulation of 2.5 million books. By 1938, the Wehrwolf had sold more than 500,000 copies (reaching 865,000 copies by 1945). This made him one of the most successful authors in Germany at the time.

On 5 January 1933, a French farmer found the boots of a German soldier in one of his fields. With the help of the local sexton, he uncovered a skeleton and identification tag. The sexton buried the body in an individual grave in a German graveyard near Loivre. It took almost 18 months for the tag to reach Berlin via the German embassy in France. This tag was subsequently lost during an Allied bombing raid on Berlin; an extant photograph of it does not allow a definite conclusion on whether the tag said "F.R." (Füselier-Regiment) or "I.R." (Infanterie-Regiment). However, on 8 May 1934 the newspaper Völkische Beobachter announced that the grave of Löns had been discovered. In October 1934, at the behest of Adolf Hitler, Löns' purported body was exhumed and brought to Germany. There was not any medical examination to try to verify that these were indeed the remains of the writer.

The 1932 movie Grün ist die Heide (Green Is The Heath) was based on Löns' writings. It was remade with great commercial success in 1951, featuring Sonja Ziemann and Rudolf Prack, and again in 1972.

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. From there they were moved to a mass grave near Loivre, where they remain to this day, according to the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, a charity. It is quite possible that Löns' remains were among them.

At the age of 48, he volunteered for service with the German Army for the First World War. Due to his ill health and weak constitution, he was rejected initially by the military. It took the intervention of an officer friend of his for Löns to be accepted as a common fusilier by the Ersatzbatallion of the Regiment Generalfeldmarschall Prinz Albrecht von Preußen, also known as 73rd Fusilier Regiment. On 26 September 1914, just three weeks after enlisting on 3 September, Löns was killed in action during an assault on a French position at Loivre near Reims in France. Of the 120 men in his unit, only two dozen survived.

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. 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. Composer Pauline Volkstein also set some of his poems to music.

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.

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, natural historian 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.

Löns had married Elisabet Erbeck (1864–1922), a divorced sales assistant, at Hanover in 1893 (engagement 1890, divorced 1901). She had five miscarriages and was committed to a sanatorium. 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. He had a child with his second wife, but their son was mentally and physically handicapped. In 1911, his family left him, after he fired a shotgun inside their home. In the divorce proceedings he had a nervous breakdown. Löns refused to pay alimony and then left without leaving an address, travelling in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands. In November 1911, Löns considered suicide. 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). Suffering from bipolar disorder, Löns veered between depression and making fantastic plans for the future.