CHAPTER 3

The Hallig - just a bunch of silt?

When I say that I live and work on Hooge, I often hear: "You live on a Hallig? What are you doing there all day? There's nothing going on!" These and similar reactions come primarily from people who have no idea of a Hallig. Neither do these people know where the Halligen lie, nor what they are, let alone what can be done there. One or the other might remember that the Halligen topic was once discussed in geography lessons.

"They're such piles of mud, aren't they?"

"Aren't those those little islands up by Sylt?"

Wrong! Halligen are not islands! And the neighbouring island is not called Sylt either, but Pellworm. Or Amrum. Or Föhr. Sylt is geographically not far away, but this island is not within sight.

The most obvious difference to an island is that Halligen are flooded several times a year. How often this happens depends on the one hand on whether a Hallig has a so-called summer dike, and on the other hand on how strong and persistent the "Blanke Hans" is. This is the title of the North Sea when it rages and storms and a land under the result is. Then the Hallig is blank and only the terps look out of the water. Each one for itself, like an ark. Hooge is the only one of the ten Halligen that has had a closed summer dike since 1914. This flat dike is called so because it is supposed to keep the smaller floods during the summer months from coming to the country. This serves to protect agricultural land. The floods in winter pass over this dike with the appropriate wind conditions. These stone edges were erected by the dike workers on the Halligen by laborious manual work. If these didn't exist, we'd have wet feet a lot more often. So on Hooge we speak only of three to five Landuntern in the autumn and winter time and extremely rarely of a Landunter in the summer months. Sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less, sometimes it starts in late summer - nature doesn't follow statistical guidelines.

Further differences are buried deeper and are still much discussed, by scholars as well as by laymen. Halligen don't have groundwater, they say. Or also: Islands have a continental shelf, Halligen do not. Halligen have grown over the centuries. They are not remains of a former coastal region, although this does not apply to the Hallig Nordstrandischmoor. This small and youngest Hallig is actually together with the peninsula Nordstrand and the island Pellworm the remnant of the sunken island Strand. This disappeared 1634 with the so-called "Burchardiflut", which is also known as "second Grote Maandränke", from the map.

One speaks thus of small islets or also marsh islands, that are flooded more or less regularly, since they lie only approximately one meter above the sea level. Then we're talking about a Landunter. This makes them unique and therefore the houses on the Halligen are built on terps. On Hooge there are ten inhabited and one uninhabited mound, the Pohnswarft. It was destroyed in a violent storm surge in 1825, known as the "February Flood", so badly that it has not been inhabited since then. No other flood has brought such destruction, even the storm surges of 1962 and 1976 were comparatively mild.

The Halligen lie in the middle of the Schleswig-Holstein Wadden Sea, one of the few wilderness areas that is still said to be a European primeval landscape. By the way, this is also said of the high region of the Alps. I have moved, so to speak, from one primeval landscape to another and have to say that I love both of them and don't want to miss any of them. The Wadden Sea is one of the most bird-rich areas in Europe, with millions of wading and water birds resting here. Since 1985 this area has been designated a national park. Not only the seabed, which can be explored at low tide, is full of attractions, but there is also always something going on on the salt marshes. There is no day when you cannot see or observe anything special.

In areas where the coexistence of nature and people is developed and tested in an exemplary manner, the primary objective is to protect cultural and natural landscapes. These are model regions that have been designated as so-called biosphere reserves by UNESCO. There are 15 biosphere reserves in Germany today, the northernmost of which is called the "Schleswig-Holstein Wadden Sea and Halligen". The Halligen have been part of it since 2005. The wish was originally born on Hooge by a group of four people and submitted as an application to the then municipal council. After a relatively short discussion, the latter agreed and was also able to convince the neighbouring Halligen. I was one of those four people.

Hallig Hooge and the other eight and nine Halligen respectively have a remarkable history that makes them unique in the world. They are situated in the middle of the sea, surrounded by a national park and part of a biosphere region - someone should say again that there is nothing going on here! There's always something going on here, you just have to be able to see it. Once upon a time, there were said to have been over a hundred Halligen. The remaining ones, which still exist today, are: Südfall, Süderoog, Norderoog, Habel, Oland, Gröde, Nordstrandischmoor, Hooge and Langeneß. The Hamburg Hallig has a dam since 1875, which connects the island with the mainland and over which even cars can drive, so she is only actually the tenth Hallig.

Hooge is also commonly known as the "Queen of the Halligen". Today, no one knows exactly how she came to this honor. Of course you're a little proud when people talk about your home or even your homeland, but is that also the case? Is Hooge above the other Halligen? I'd say that's not the case. There's no reason why Hooge should be queen. With its 560 hectares Hooge is the second largest Hallig, so Langeneß should be the empress and Nordstrandischmoor the princess. That would certainly not be a particularly promising marketing strategy. Today we speak more of the uniqueness of the Halligen and the individual strength of each individual. I think it's more appropriate. Nevertheless, there are royal and even imperial traces on Hooge.

Until 1864 Hooge belonged to Denmark. After a heavy storm tide, the then Danish King Frederik VI went on an inspection tour. He wanted to get a personal impression of the damage caused by the storm in his country. As soon as the king arrived at Hooge, the weather changed and he could no longer leave the Hallig. So he spent the night in what was then probably the most beautiful house on the Hallig, a 17th century captain's house. This house, which since then has been called "Königspesel" according to its status, is today a small, family-run museum that displays an impressive example of Frisian living culture. In this case the whole house is called Pesel, but this Frisian term actually refers only to a room in a residential building. The Pesel is the "good room" where guests were welcomed. Today we would equate that with the salon.

The traces that our last German empress indirectly left on Hooge are not so easy to understand. Empress Auguste Viktoria was outstandingly committed to Protestant church building and she was always strongly attached to her native Schleswig-Holstein. It is said that she had her fingers in the planning and/or financing of the Hoog Pastorate in 1907. Unfortunately, there are no well-founded sources, but if you look at the stately and for a Hallig atypical building on the Kirchwarft and consider the passion of the empress, it is easy to believe the story.

Artists have also discovered Hooge for themselves. Partly because of commissioned work, partly because of a passion for extraordinary landscapes. In order to stay at the Kirchwarft for a short time, I refer to the pulpit of our small Hallig church from 1641, which comes from the workshop of the Flensburg master Heinrich Ringeling. An artist from today has already carved his traces in stone in the truest sense of the word. Unique gravestones of Uli Lindow can be seen in the cemetery. If we go back about two hundred years, we meet the Halligmaler Jacob Alberts, who lived on Hooge especially during the summer months. I find it interesting that Jacob Alberts also settled in Munich for a few years during his apprenticeship. So even in former times the way from Munich to the Hallig was found. Nikolaus Soltau and Peter Lübbers are often mentioned in the same breath when talking about Hooges artists. But if these names don't mean anything to you, you certainly know this one: Emil Nolde. He is one of the most important expressionists in Europe and was fascinated by the unique landscape of the Halligen. During his stays at Hooge, he gave the peculiar Hallig world its own colours and its own character, thus stimulating the imagination of the viewer of his pictures even today. Just like Theodor Storm does in his novella Eine Halligfahrt. The poet's spiritual freedom is as boundless as the creative freedom of a painter, and Theodor Storm proves that he had a keen eye for the Hallig world when he raves about the Hallig as "floating dreams".

Five of the worldwide unique ten Halligen are inhabited and almost all can be visited by holidaymakers, although not all year round and not all with overnight stays. Every Hallig is different, each one has something different to discover and experience. The special features of the Halligen can not only be seen in their fauna and flora, but also in their history. They are not only accumulations formed in the course of the centuries by the deposition of various sediments. We don't just live here on man-made mounds of earth, the terps. Halligen are more! Here you are one step closer to heaven. The horizon has no end here. Here you experience "floating dreams" - more longing is not possible! A longing that can be fulfilled, experienced and...