Qualla: Fehmarn

Fehmarn: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Viola sonans, CC BY-SA 2.5. At 12:56 on the afternoon of Sunday 6 September 1970, Jimi Hendrix walked onto a stage in a cold, wind-scoured field near Flügge lighthouse and was met with cheering and booing in roughly equal measure. He played Hey Joe, Purple Haze, Voodoo Child (Slight Return). Accounts of the set agree it was a tired one — routine, unhurried, the playing of a man with nothing left to prove and not much energy to prove it with. Twelve days later he was dead in London. The Love-and-Peace Festival on Fehmarn was the last full concert of his life, and almost nothing about it went the way anyone had planned.

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Image: Viola sonans | CC BY-SA 2.5

Fehmarn: Three Days of Rain and Rockers

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joachim Müllerchen, CC BY-SA 3.0. The festival ran from 4 to 6 September 1970 and drew around 25,000 people to a coastal field in the island's southwest corner. Friday brought storms and unbroken rain. Saturday stayed cold and windy and then rained again. Overnight before it began, 180 members of a Hamburg motorc...

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Image: Joachim Müllerchen | CC BY-SA 3.0

Fehmarn: In the Sea

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thomas Woodtli from Zürich, Switzerland, CC BY-SA 2.0. The island's name is older than any of that and considerably plainer. It comes from the Polabian Slavic fe more — in the sea — sharing its root with Pomerania, po more, at the sea. Fehmarn was settled in the early Middle Ages by the Wagri, a Lechitic Slavic tribe, and marks one o...

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Image: Thomas Woodtli from Zürich, Switzerland | CC BY-SA 2.0

Fehmarn: The Sun Island

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unukorno, CC BY-SA 3.0. Fehmarn covers 185 square kilometres with 78 kilometres of coast and about 13,000 residents, making it Germany's third-largest island after Rügen and Usedom. It is also flat: the highest ground, the Hinrichsberg, manages 27.9 metres. What it lacks in relief it makes up for in lig...

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Image: Unukorno | CC BY-SA 3.0

Fehmarn: Weight the Island Carries

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Viola sonans, CC BY 2.5. Not all the island's history is holiday reading. On 26 July 1932 the German navy's sail training ship Niobe was caught by a sudden squall off Fehmarn's north coast and capsized. Sixty-nine people died. She was a training ship, and the loss was felt across the German navy for a ge...

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Image: Viola sonans | CC BY 2.5

Fehmarn: Bridge, Ferry, Tunnel

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hubertus45, CC BY-SA 3.0. Everything on Fehmarn eventually comes back to the crossing. Since 1963 the Fehmarn Sound Bridge has tied the island to the mainland, and at Puttgarden four Scandlines ferries run to Rødby on the Danish island of Lolland every half hour, around the clock, over the eighteen kilome...

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Image: Hubertus45 | CC BY-SA 3.0