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Workers song I learned the song as a child at school in East Berlin. It sounded dark, poetic, and had a strange power. “Wherever the eye looks, moor and heather just all around. Vogelsang doesn’t refresh us, oaks stand bare and crooked. ”I learned in class that prisoners from the Börgermoor concentration camp in Emsland sang about their fate. They had to go to exhaustion every day ➝ Cut peat and create paths through the moor. In August 1933 they were allowed to perform a revue, a bit of a circus. For the last number they came on stage in prison clothes, armed with spades: “We are the moor soldiers and we go into the moor with the spade …” The song then went around the world. Ernst Busch sang it with the Spanish brigades and also greeted the “comrades in German camps”. Pete Seeger and Hannes Wader created their own versions of the anti-fascist anthem. They covered Die Toten Hosen in 2012 and saw them more as a call not to give up in difficult times. Maxi linen purchase
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Organic farmer While Baerbock and Habeck visited the moor in Brandenburg, did the Moor has long been his adopted home there: Swiss TV presenter Max Moor has lived in Hirschfelde, a few kilometers northeast of Berlin, since 2003. He is known for his deep voice. Moor has moderated the ARD cultural program for 14 years ttt – title, theses, temperaments. Even if it cannot store as much CO₂ as a real moor, the Swiss are living the green dream. His wife Sonja Moor gave up her job and did an agricultural apprenticeship. Since then, the two have been running a Demeter farm. In the meantime, they also bred water buffalo on their 70 hectare site. Ecologically correct and within reach of the urban flair: With their farm and lifestyle, the Moor family would also be a good election campaign backdrop for the Greens. Ben Mendelson
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poetry It is a landscape that immediately calls up inner images (➝ Worpswede). Annette von Droste-Hülshoffs The boy in the moor is an example that is used again and again to describe horror, mystery and danger and the beautiful shiver that accompanies them. “Oh, it’s gruesome to walk across the moor / When it is teeming with heather smoke …”
For Droste-Hülshoff (1797 – 1848) it is a fairytale, short, dark child horror that ends in light and security. Christian Morgenstern (1871 – 1914) condenses already experienced fears and losses that call up a Moor fantasy about the shudder of death. “Death sits on the stump: / dull fiddle lures and threatens / with confused topics,” it says in Am Moor. This was written by someone who already knows fear and grief. “The old willows are so gray” from Goethe in a playful way Elf king called. With Georg Trakl (1887 – 1914) it is not the willows, but stunted birches that sigh in the wind. There is a lot of lyrical music in these verses and a lot, sometimes too much wind, now and then also about your own verse art. Magda Geisler
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mission The “Friedländer Große Wiese”, a fen area in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, was drained by the FDJ brigades of that time through kilometer-long ditch systems at the end of the 1950s. The initiative found a place in the novel Egon and the eighth wonder of the world, the film of the same name was cult in the GDR. The meadow landscape is used for agriculture, for cattle breeding. After drainage and the very dry years of the past, the former peat soil lacks a lot of water; the decomposition of plant matter releases a particularly large amount of carbon dioxide (➝ Climate protectors). New models are now looking for ways to manage bog meadows gently. Maxi linen purchase
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Wetlands Both the bog and the swamp (➝ Marais) belong to this type of landscape. Even if they are often treated as synonyms, there are differences. Bog is always saturated with water, it does not dry out, and ➝ Peat is created. Swamp, on the other hand, can dry out and produce fertile soil. However, Charlotte Roche’s novel “Feutchgebiet” was not about technical details. It appeared a few years ago and placed certain body areas and openings under express protection from excessive cleanliness. The right to naturalness was defended with many metaphors and resulted in high editions. Magda Geisler
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Hype At some point everyone felt like they were on a virtual grouse hunt, and the advertising gag turned into hype. When the Scottish whiskey brand Johnnie Walker offered “Moorhuhn” as a free promotional game in 1999, it made viral marketing a hit. It was presented in selected pubs. Good shooters were given the game as a gift, which they soon redistributed – the file was small enough to be emailed. The cult began. Culture pessimists conjured horrific business failures because the popularity did not stop at offices. The animal welfare association annoyed the game principle of the shoot ’em up, which was disrespectful towards the protection of species. Because that consists in targeting as many red grouse as possible with the shotgun in 90 seconds. Countless successors conquered the market, the Moorhuhn is available as a pinball machine, soccer simulation and racing game for the latest consoles. Tobias Prüwer
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Climate protectors Peat bogs are an efficient aid in nature against flooding. They can absorb water like a sponge; their absorbency is five times stronger than that of meadows, for example. This storage process delays the release of water to streams and rivers – and thus helps to contain floods.
Wet bogs can also permanently store carbon: Constant excess of water creates low-oxygen conditions, which ensures that microorganisms cannot live well here and do not completely decompose dead biomass. For thousands of years, moors have therefore stored large amounts of carbon: although they only take up three percent of the world’s land area, their peat contains twice as much carbon as the entire biomass of all forests on earth – 500 gigatons. Humans dry out heaps of bogs – and thereby cause high emissions (➝ Mission). Nick Reimer
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Marais In the middle of the Parisian district, whose name means “swamp” or “moor”, is the Place des Vosges, a celebratory green area, 140 x 140 m, surrounded on three sides by red-brick houses, all of which have the royal pavilion at the south end resemble. Victor Hugo lived in No. 6. The square was built as Place Royale until 1612 by order of Henry IV. How often have we had breakfast under the trees on the edge, camembert, liver pate and tomato slices in sliced baguette, and then drank Café Crème and Café noir at the Saint-Paul metro station. God must really have lived in France. The former marshland was only drained in the 13th and 14th centuries. Michael Hunter
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pack In physiotherapy and natural cosmetics, people have long sworn by the black gold and ascribe healing properties to it. Paracelsus recommended it for various diseases. The application takes place as a full bath or pack in or with bath peat, which is extracted in moors. The thick baths with up to 46 degrees store heat and slowly release it to the body. About 20 minutes in the muddy broth will raise your body temperature; Fever is simulated, which is supposed to stimulate the metabolism. The muscles relax due to the warmth. A floating effect relieves the entire joint system of the body as much as possible for the duration of the bath. Don’t do it at home: Big mess. Each Allenstein
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peat If you don’t like whiskey with a peat note, you can’t go wrong. Many fans of the Scottish-Irish droplet swear by it. Extensive deposits of peat can be found on the islands, which is why the plant sediments offered themselves as fuel. The malted barley for the distilleries was also dried on peat fires – the earthy, smoky nuance was created, which is particularly typical of whiskeys from Northern Scotland. It is extremely pronounced in the island whiskeys from the Hebrides. The peat (➝ Package) thus signals the origin. For many, it also opens up associations, they combine the spirit with rough wind, rugged coast and untouched nature, in short, with wild freedom. Tobias Prüwer
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Worpswede He is known as a painter from the Worpswede artists’ colony, Otto Modersohn, born in Soest in 1865. His main work was created in the Teufelsmoor. Here, between the moor, the marshes and the Geest, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Heinrich Vogeler, Bernhard Hoetger and Rainer Maria Rilke have also worked since 1889. What attracted them magically was the search for solitude, silence and inwardness. This artist colony teaches us that great art does not only thrive in metropolises. And also that one Autumn morning on the moor canal can be picture-worthy, as one of Modersohn’s works is called. Modersohn always paints the same motifs here: storm-bent birches on the wayside, bog boats, fields, thatched houses, the evening mood over the rivers and canals. Gloomy, melancholy North German landscapes, the strength of which lies in the repetition of the same moods. Worpswede, the village in the Teufelsmoor, was for several summers the center and place of longing for the young modern age. Marc Peschke
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Zeitkapsel Lack of oxygen and humic acids in the moor prevent decomposition by microorganisms. Tannic acid preserves corpses. In moors from the Netherlands to North Jutland, one comes across dead bodies from the pre-Roman Iron Age. The now 700 finds provide important insights into cultural habits from an era from which no written sources are available. The oldest moor corpse, Moora, discovered in 2000 in Uchter Moor in Lower Saxony, died young of natural causes around 650 BC. But most of the bog bodies are male. The famous Tollundmann from a Danish moor, over 2,000 years old and probably sacrificed to the god Thor, wears the noose around his neck to this day. The Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney dedicated two poems to him (➝ Poetry). Helena Neumann
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