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 mo