Burchardi flood
The Burchardi flood was a devastating storm surge that devastated the North Sea coast between Ribe and Brunsbüttel on the night of October 11th to 12th, 1634 . Between 8,000 and 15,000 people fell victim to it. The worst damage occurred in the area of North Friesland , where water and wind caused devastating damage to Eiderstedt in particular , and large parts of the island of Alt-Nordstrand went under in the sea.
After the second Marcellus flood of 1362, the Burchardi flood went down in history as another Grote Mandränke (about "great drowning"). The flood, like other floods , was named after a saint: October 14th is the name day of Bishop Burkhard von Würzburg .
prehistory
The Burchardi flood hit the west coast of Schleswig-Holstein in a time of economic weakness. This flood was the last in a series of storm surges that hit the Schleswig-Holstein coast in the first third of the 17th century and caused heavy losses. Where the Heverstrom met the island of Strand north of the former Rungholt , a parish had to be given up at the beginning of the century . In 1615 Rickelsbüll, the westernmost town of the Wiedingharde , went under. In 1625, large ice floes caused damage to the dikes during the so-called ice flood . In the years before 1634, the chronicles report several dike breaches during summer floods. The fact that the dikes no longer held even in summer indicates that they were in poor condition at the time; the dykes were further weakened by the summer flood damage. To make matters worse, drainage and peat extraction had lowered the level of the diked land below sea level.
A plague epidemic that had killed numerous residents had swept across the country in 1603. In addition, the flood fell during the Thirty Years' War , from which the Schleswig-Holstein coast was not spared. In particular on Alt-Nordstrand (also known as the beach ) there was fighting between the inhabitants and the troops of the Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf duke Friedrich III in 1628/1629 . came. The Nordstrander fought against ducal interference in their military constitution and against the forced billeting of soldiers. Supported by a Danish naval command, they first repulsed an imperial and then a ducal army. Around 1629 they were defeated. The island and the maintenance of the coastal defenses suffered from these fighting.
course
After calm weather had prevailed in the days before the flood, on October 11th a strong storm came up from the east, which in the course of the evening turned to the southwest and developed into a hurricane from the northwest. It was probably a Jutland-type storm depression that reached very high wind speeds in a small area and for a relatively short time. The most detailed eyewitness report comes from the Dutch hydraulic engineer Jan Adriaanszoon Leeghwater , who was commissioned to extract part of the Dagebüller Bay from the sea. He describes:
- Towards evening a great storm and storm rose from the sea from the south-west [...] Then the wind from the west began to blow so violently that no sleep came to our eyes. After we had been on the bed for about an hour, my son said to me, "Father, I feel the water drip on my face." The waves leapt up at the sea dike onto the roof of the house. It was very dangerous to listen to.
Leeghwater and his son fled over the dike to the higher manor house, while the water had already reached about the height of the dike crest. There were 38 people in the house, 20 of whom were refugees from low-lying areas. He continued:
- The wind turned a little to the northwest and blew flat against the mansion, so hard and stiff as I have never seen it in my life. On a strong door that stood on the west side, the bolts jumped out of the jamb from the waves of the sea, so that the water put out the fire and came so high into the hall that it ran over my knee boots, about 13 feet higher than the maize field of the old country [...] At the north end of the manor house, which stood close to the lake, the earth washed away from under the house [...] As a result, the house, the hallway and the floor burst apart [...] It seemed no different than the manor house should go with Rinse everyone who was in it from the dike. In the morning […] all the tents and huts that were on the whole work were washed away, thirty-six or thirty-seven in number, with all the people who were in them. [...] Large seagoing ships had stopped on the high dike, as I saw myself. Several ships were parked on the high street in Husum . I also rode the beach there, and saw strange things there, lots of different dead animals, beams from houses, smashed wagons and lots of wood, hay, straw and stubble. I also saw quite a few people who had drowned.
The eyewitness Peter Sax from Koldenbüttel on Eiderstedt described the scenario:
- [...] at six o'clock in the evening the Lord God began to rage from the east with wind and rain, at seven he turned the wind to the southwest and let it blow so strongly that almost no one could walk or stand, at eight and At nine all the dikes were smashed [...] The Lord God thundered, rained, hailed, flashed and the wind blew so powerfully that the foundations of the earth moved [...] at ten o'clock everything was done .
In conjunction with half a spring tide , the wind pushed the water into the Rungholter Bay on Alt-Nordstrand with such force that the first dike in the parish of Stintebüll broke around ten o'clock in the evening . A little later the wind turned to the northwest. The water peaked about two hours after midnight. Contemporary reports speak for the mainland of about four meters above mean tidal high water , only a little below the highest level of a previously scientifically measured storm surge: The 1976 flood in Husum reached the mark of 4.11 meters above mean tidal high water. The water rose so high that not only did numerous other dikes break, but also houses in the flat marshland and even on terps were flooded. Houses collapsed and fires broke out in others as fires got out of hand.
Direct consequences
The dikes broke in several hundred places that night. Estimates of the total number of victims vary between 8,000 and 15,000. Of these, 8,000 local victims have been confirmed by contemporary sources and a comparison with population registers. The actual number is probably much higher, since, according to Anton Heimreich's North Frisian Chronicle , "there were many foreign threshers and workers in the country at the time, and we cannot be certain of their number."
On the beach alone, at least 6123 people died as a result of the 44 dike breaches, which corresponds to around two thirds of the island's population. In addition, 50,000 head of cattle drowned. The water destroyed 1,300 houses and 30 mills; all 21 churches on the beach were badly damaged, 17 of them completely destroyed. Almost the entire freshly harvested annual yield from the fields was lost. The island of Strand was torn into the islands (New) - Nordstrand and Pellworm as well as the Halligen Südfall and Nordstrandischmoor , the Halligen Nübbel and Nieland sank into the sea.
According to Anton Heimreich's North Frisian Chronicle, 2107 people died on Eiderstedt , 12,802 head of cattle drowned, and 664 houses were destroyed by the flood. Anton Heimreich counted 383 deaths for Dithmarschen , which were concentrated in the parish of Busen (today Büsum ) and the areas along the Eider Estuary , where 168 people died, 1,360 head of cattle were lost and 102 houses were "driven away". Numerous people died in the marshland on the coast, even places further away from the coast such as Bargum , Breklum , Almdorf or Bohmstedt were not left without victims. Even in Hamburg, levees broke in Hammerbrook and Wilhelmsburg . In today's Lower Saxony, the dike in Hove broke at 900 meters.
The ambitious work of the Gottorf dukes to dike the Dagebüller Bay with a single dam, which after ten years of work seemed to be on the right path, finally failed due to the flood. The Halligen Dagebüll and Fahretoft suffered great losses on land and life. In Ockholm the church was destroyed and the sea dike had to be moved inland.
Long term consequences
The flood had a particularly devastating effect on Alt-Nordstrand, as large parts of the country there were below sea level. In the weeks and months after the flood, the water did not drain away. The tidal current ensured that the dyke breaches continued to widen over the course of time, and the current sometimes tore away entire stretches of dyke. So it came about that numerous areas of land that were still being cultivated immediately after the flood had to be given up, as they could not be held against the repeatedly penetrating water. Salt water repeatedly washed over the fields, so that the north beaches could no longer use them for agriculture.
M. Löbedanz, the pastor of the village Gaikebüll , which was abandoned after the flood , described the situation on Strand after the flood:
- There are more desert than half the residential cities, and the houses are peeled away (washed away); The other houses are in the desert, and windows, doors and turning are broken: there are whole parishes in the desert, and there are more remaining in some few landlords: the houses of worship are in the desert, and there are neither preachers nor landlords who visit many of them.
The Alt-Nordstrander variant of North Frisian was culturally lost. The number of victims was too high, and many former islanders moved against the orders of Duke Friedrich III. to the mainland or the higher Hallig Nordstrandischmoor to secure your life there.
As early as 1637, 1800 hectares of land were dug up again on Pellworm. In Nordstrand, on the other hand, the farmers who stayed behind lived as Hallig farmers on terps in the years after the flood , but were hardly able to till their fields, let alone, despite several orders from the Duke, to rebuild the dikes. According to Nordstrander Deichrecht those forfeited the right on land who were not able to secure it against the sea. Finally, the Duke decided to implement the Frisian law “ De nich will dieken, de mutt wieken ”, expropriated the original inhabitants and enticed them with an octroy that promised the donors of the dyke building land ownership as well as extensive privileges such as judicial and police sovereignty over the won kings , invited foreign investors like the Dutch entrepreneur Quirinus Indervelden , who, financed with Dutch money and with the help of skilled workers from Brabant , was able to build the first dike around the Alterkoog in 1654 . The Osterkoog followed in 1657 and the Trindermarschkoog in 1663 . The old Catholic community still bears witness to the settlement of the Dutch . The Catholic Dutch were allowed to keep their religion in Lutheran Denmark and to build their own church. Until 1870 the pastors still preached the sermon there in Dutch.
As a result of additional land reclamation in the following centuries, the two islands together have around 9,000 hectares, around a third of the area of Alt-Nordstrand. The Norderhever , a tidal current that has dug up to 30 meters deep into the tidal flats over the past 370 years and repeatedly threatens to attack the bases of the two islands, formed between the islands.
reception
The people of that time could only imagine the flood in the context of their worldview based on Christian teaching. Like other catastrophes, the Burchardi flood was received in sermons and other writings and interpreted as a special punishment from God. The description of the disaster was often combined with a call to penance. The evangelical enthusiast and poet Anna Ovena Hoyer went the furthest, interpreting the Burchardi flood, which she had survived in the attic of the flooded Tönningen Castle , as the beginning of the approaching apocalypse in connection with the Thirty Years' War . She saw the fact that only a few of the Nordstrand preachers had survived as confirmation of her criticism of the existing church.
See also
literature
- Marie Luisa Allemeyer: "In this terrible, unheard-of water flood, you can't look for any natural causes". The Burchardi flood of 1634 on the North Sea coast , in: Gerrit Jasper Schenk (Ed.): Catastrophes. From the fall of Pompeii to climate change , Ostfildern 2009, pp. 93–108.
- Boy Hinrichs: Anna Ovena Hoyer and her two storm tide songs , in: Nordfriesisches Jahrbuch , nF 21 (1985), 195–221
- Boy Hinrichs: The destructive flood of sin. Experience and representation of a catastrophe in: Hinrichs (Ed.): Flood catastrophe 1634
- Boy Hinrichs: flood disaster 1634. Nature history seal. Neumünster 1991 (2nd edition) Karl Wachholtz Verlag. ISBN 3-529-06185-9
- Manfred Jakubowski-Tiessen : “Terrible and unheard-of water flood” Perception and interpretation of the flood disaster of 1634, in: Manfred Jakubowski-Tiessen u. Hartmut Lehmann (Ed.): For heaven's sake. Religion in times of disaster , Göttingen 2003, pp. 179–200.
- Dirk Meier / Hans Joachim Kühn / Guus J. Borger: The coastal atlas. The Schleswig-Holstein Wadden Sea in the past and present ; Boyens (Heide) 2013
- Albert E. Panten: Life in North Friesland around 1600 using the example of Nordstrands in: Hinrichs (Ed.): Flood catastrophe 1634 , pp. 65–80
- Guntram Riecken: The flood catastrophe on October 11, 1634 - causes, damage and effects on the coastal form of North Friesland, in: Hinrichs (Ed.): Flood catastrophe 1634 , pp. 11–64
- Thomas Steensen: "that the foundations of the earth moved". The "Mandränke" of October 11, 1634 . In: Nordfriesland , No. 167 (September 2009), pp. 14-20
Web links
- Text of a contemporary pamphlet on the subject
- Maps of the changing coastlines in Schleswig-Holstein 900-2000
- Fateful floods: The Grote Mandränke as an NDR report from January 16, 2012
Individual evidence
- ^ Fritz-Ferdinand Zitscher: The terrible water flood 1634 . Ed .: Andreas Reinhardt. Husum Druck- und Verlagsgesellschaft, Husum 1984, ISBN 3-88042-257-5 , The influence of storm surges on the historical development of the North Frisian habitat, p. 169 .
- ↑ cit. n. Riecken: 11ff.
- ↑ cit. n. Rieckmer: 35
- ↑ cit. n. Riecken: 42
- ↑ Rolf Kuschert: The early modern times , in: Nordfriisk Instituut (ed.) History of North Friesland , Heide Boyens & Co 1995. ISBN 3-8042-0759-6
- ↑ Marie Luise Allemeyer: "No country without a dike ...!" Lifeworlds of a coastal society in the early modern period ; Göttingen 2006; P. 297
- ↑ Jakubowski-Tiessen, “Terrible and unheard-of water flood” , pp. 198–200