Drevani Erotic

The Drevani were a West Slavic people who lived inside the bend of the lower Elbe, in what is now the Lüchow-Dannenberg district of Lower Saxony, from around the seventh century until they were absorbed into the German-speaking population in the middle of the eighteenth. Their descendants are the ordinary Germans of that region, and no separate Slavic identity outlived the language. Their distinction is stubbornness: they were the westernmost Slavs in Europe, settled on the near bank of the Elbe with Saxons on every side, and they were the last of the Elbe Slavs to keep speaking Slavic, holding on for centuries after the tribes across the river had gone over to German. Their name comes from the Slavic word for wood or tree, and the low sandy ridge at the heart of their country still carries it: the Drawehn. It was never good land. Bog, heath and thin soil made the Wendland a corner nobody fought hard over, which is probably why the speech lasted. Politically they were taken early: Frankish and Saxon pressure brought them inside the empire long before the Wendish Crusade of 1147 turned on the Slavs east of the river, and by the High Middle Ages the Drevani were a subject peasantry holding their fields, their Christianity and their own tongue.

That tongue, Drevanian Polabian, belonged to the Lechitic branch, a close cousin of Polish and Kashubian, and it held on to things its neighbors had dropped, among them nasal vowels and the dual number for pairs. By the end it was full of German loanwords and German stress habits, spoken by farmers who were bilingual and knew which of the two languages paid. Guild statutes and local ordinances in the Lüneburg lands penalized Wendish descent; speaking Wendish marked you as the wrong sort of neighbor, and dropping it was a rational thing to do. Nearly everything known about the language was written down at the last minute, mostly by Lutheran pastors curious about their own parishioners: Christian Hennig von Jessen at Wustrow assembled a vocabulary around 1700. The best witness is a farmer, Johann Parum Schultze, who kept a chronicle and observed in the 1720s that once he and three other men in his village were dead, nobody would know what a Wend had been. He was close to right; the last speakers died around 1750. What is left sits on the map and in the ground plan of the villages: hundreds of place names in -ow and -itz, Slavic family names, and the Rundlinge, horseshoe hamlets facing a common green, whose origins are still argued over and which the Wendland has claimed as its Slavic inheritance.