Harzer (profession)
With Harz persons being engaged in activities related to the resin production or processing. Resin is a handicraft activity that largely disappeared in the 19th and 20th centuries, partly as an independent profession and partly as a sideline to gain extra bread. Resin was used as a raw material for the production of pitch , tar and turpentine .
Terminology
In addition to Harzer, the names Harzbrenner ( Pfalz ), Pecher ( Lower Austria ), Pechler, Pechsieder , Harzeinsammler and Harzscharrer were also in use.
Craft
The Harzers leased a piece of forest or were employed in forest companies. He harvested around nine tons of resin from around 3000 trees per season. The Harz used for his work scrapers , planers , drip tray puller and pot .
Widely used since ancient times is the resin of pine trees in the form of Lebendharzung . The tree is injured by removing some of the bark from the trunk and making cuts in the wood below, and the resin that runs off is caught, collected and processed. As a result of these injuries and the “bleeding” of the wood, it was largely unusable as construction or timber. That was one reason why there was enmity between Harzers and foresters.
The yield of resin depended on the weather; only when it is warm and humid do trees excrete the resin, so that southern countries had an advantage.
To increase yields were also Schwelöfen (in Pfälzerwald : Harzöfen ) used, by which the raw wood materials (resinous Kienholz ) in a pyrolysis was processed method to resin and pitch. The resin distillery was heavily regulated in part to prevent wood crime .
In the 19th century ever larger plants for resin extraction were built, the workers were the Harzers or Pechsieder . In the Palatinate, the names of streets and districts ( Harzofen in Kaiserslautern and near Elmstein ) still bear witness to the industry that has been lost since the beginning of the 20th century.
Pitch was extracted from resin. When the pitch boilers boiled it, it dissolved into rosin and turpentine. These were used as lubricants, sealants and solvents as well as adhesives in paper production.
In 1918, the Germans only started mining resin because there were no trading partners for the raw material due to the war. In the German Democratic Republic , resin was obtained on a large scale in this way until the fall of the Wall .
The occupation of the Harzer disappeared mainly because low-wage countries displaced the Central European providers of the Harz; moreover, plastics are now in most cases replacing resin products.
See also
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Helmut Seebach: Old crafts and trades in the Palatinate - Palatinate Forest , Annweiler-Qeichhambach, 1994, p. 117 ff.
- ↑ Harzer. In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm (Hrsg.): German dictionary . tape 10 : H, I, J - (IV, 2nd division). S. Hirzel, Leipzig 1877 ( woerterbuchnetz.de ).
- ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung: Forgotten Professions: These jobs no longer exist. Retrieved May 8, 2020 .