Station: [5] Museum of Local History - Cutting Peat

This is the story of the peat-cutters:

In the Donaumoos fen, peat was cut by hand. For people living in the fen, it was the only fuel available, and for many poor wage-earners and owners of smallholdings, it provided a badly needed income.

The girl in the photograph smiles happily into the camera. But the image is deceptive, because cutting peat is backbreaking work. Peat-cutting was piece-work, and workers would cut between 7,000 and 10,000 slabs a day. Women and children stacked the peat and helped to bring it in. 

Using a shovel, and working along the length or breadth of the field, the peat-cutter would clear the loose upper layer of soil to a width of around 50 centimeters or a foot and a half and throw the soil to one side. Then, he’d use a U-shaped tool called a peat iron to cut slabs roughly 40 centimeters or sixteen inches long out of the solid peat layer. That meant constantly bending over – traditionally, it was said a good peat-cutter must never see the sun. He would cut row after row and stack the wet slabs to one side to dry – the German term for these stacks is “Torfrixen”. 

Fields stripped of peat in this way ended up more than a foot lower than before and hence closer to the ground water level. They tended to become waterlogged. So peat-cutting ran counter to the drainage efforts and impaired the value of the farmland. Nevertheless, farming and peat-cutting coexisted for around two hundred years, despite being an uneconomical mix. 

In 1926, a law was passed that banned peat-cutting to protect the landscape. But during the Second World War, barracks had to be heated with peat, and the post-war period saw a lot of stoves burning peat. It was only after oil heating was introduced in the 1960s that peat-cutting became unprofitable.