2024-01-16 16:34:55
“Lewwer duad üs Slaav” culture
The old ballad that explains the anger of the farmers
As of: 3:34 p.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes
Detlev von Liliencron likes this
Source: picture alliance/dpa/Axel Heimken
You can listen to our WELT podcasts here
In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is necessary, as the providers of the embedded content require this consent as third party providers [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (revocable at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can revoke your consent at any time using the switch and privacy at the bottom of the page.
The saying “Lewwer duad üs Slaav” is proudly displayed in the coat of arms of farmers from North Frisia. It is also in a poem that had to be memorized in GDR schools. What does all this have to do with a tyrannical murder on Sylt and the dispute over taxes?
The signs and banners at the farmers’ protests were a celebration for cryptologists and other sign interpreters. One person seriously read a poster advertising “Föhrer vegetables” as “Führer vegetables” and promptly tweeted himself into an anti-fascist fit. The farmers who decorated their tractors with the saying “Lewwer duad üs Slaav” certainly came from the islands and the mainland around the North Sea island of Föhr.
The saying is a traditional rebellion slogan in northern Germany, where people speak Frisian and Low German. However, like so many things that are supposedly ancient in the Middle Ages, it dates back to the Romantic period. The slogan, which means “Better dead than a slave,” has been used in different spellings since the 1840s and, according to many sources, has proven to be politically compatible. The Nazis needed him and in the GDR Detlev von Liliencron’s “Pidder Lüng“Textbook reading that was memorized.
also read
In this ballad from 1892, the saying “Lewwer duad üs Slaav” has the function of a refrain or (if the text is sung as by Achim Reichel on his rock record “Rain Ballade” 1978) a refrain. Liliencron’s poem puts the slogan of freedom in the mouth of the Sylt fisherman Pidder Lüng, who refuses to pay the tithe, i.e. a tax-like levy of ten percent, to the bailiff of Tonder. He justifies this with the old freedom from taxes.
The bailiff threatens at the beginning: “And I can’t believe the fishermen’s taxes./ Let them leave their noses and ears,/ And I defy their word:/ Lewwer duad üs Slaav!” When the knight angrily spits into the kale pot of the stubborn Pidder , the fisherman grabs him and pushes his head into the “red-hot porridge” until he suffocates. The bailiff’s mercenaries then kill Pidder and many others: “Knives and murder are raging in the dunes and in the village.”
also read
As a nutritious and vitamin-rich winter vegetable, kale is still a popular food in the north today. The bailiff at Liliencron is called Hennig Pogwisch. The Pogwischs were a knightly family in the area of North Frisia, which the writer also mentions in other works, for example in the drama “The Rantzwo and the Pogwisch”, in the story “The Kings of Norderoog and Süderoog” and in the ballad “The Head of Saint John on the Bowl”. At least one of them, Wulf Pogwisch (1485-1554), was considered a particularly brutal abuser of his farmers and other subordinates.
Many centuries have passed since then, and no subject has to worry about noses and ears, but just as back then, the conflict arises today because an old law is to be made obsolete by a new one. And again it’s about taxes.
#Lewwer #duad #üs #Slaav #ballad #explains #anger #farmers