When the storm warning was issued, Katja Just walked around the house, checked to see if everything was safe, and waited for the water

It is the house that has forced Katja Just to make a decision. Between the south and the north. The mountains and the sea. The job and the independence. The noise and silence. The house, which bears the name "Haus am Landsende", has been standing on the Ockenswarft on the Hallig Hooge for 300 years. If the wind comes from the east, it seems to duck along with its thatched roof. In the sunlight, it shines red in the front and bright white behind in the midst of high-stemmed roses, lavender and herbal beds. The house stands in one spot in the North Sea: 5.6 square kilometers of marshland, on which about 100 people live. Including four children who go to school and a kindergarten child. On the spot, between April and September, there are 90,000 day visitors and in winter the tide, which was so high in December 2013 as it was rare. When the storm warning was issued, Katja Just walked around the house, checked to see if everything was safe, and waited for the water. It came at night. She sat in her house like a ship on the high seas. As the water drained in the day, she heard the grass crackle as it straightened up. It's that feeling of freedom under a wide sky, says the 39-year-old, who feels her every time she comes out of her house and looks out at the Hallig from the Warft Crown. And it's the colors that she loves about Hooge. The white of the snow and the gray green of the wild North Sea in winter, the yellow of buttercups and dandelions in spring. The bright light, which never disappears completely in the summer, the green of the pastures on which the cows stand.

Katja Just met Hooge in her childhood. She was seven when her parents rented an apartment there for the first time, because the doctor had advised them to do so because of her bronchitis. She was here three summers, on a farm on the Ipkenswarft with cows and calves. When it was strong enough, the kids strapped on the roller skates, held the jacket over their heads like a sail, and blew themselves across the streets. Later, when her mother and stepfather were on vacation again on Hooge, this time in the house on the Ockenswarft, the then owner told her that she wanted to sell it and move to the mainland. The parents of Katja Just bought the house and restored it. The stepfather made drawings, how everything should be, the mother filled the Pesel, the good room, which was once used only on holidays and for celebrations, and the Döns, the lounge for everyday life, with antiques from all over Germany: a Frisian wedding cabinet , a table with a 17th century wooden panel, chairs from the meeting room of an old town hall, an old iron pot for the open hearth. She decorated the niches in the old dining room with silver spoons and old Frisian porcelain behind glass. Together, they restored the alcoves, the traditional bed niches, and the mother laid the garden on the model of an old monastery garden.

The Kate of Katja Just on Hallig Hooge

Living in a Kate on the Hallig Hooge

What motivates a woman to leave everything behind to live alone in a cabin on the Hallig Hooge? Katja Just did that.

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Antique sitting area with chairs

A cozy sitting area in the living room of the Halligkate.

© Frank Siemers 2 out of 10

Antiques from all over Germany

A true Schatztrue with antiques from all over Germany has become from the old Halligkate.

© Frank Siemers 3 out of 10

Shell decoration in the window niche

Dried sea animals in an antique cup. The matching decoration with great attention to detail makes the Kate very comfortable.

© Frank Siemers 4 out of 10

Sitting area in the garden

The seating area in the garden is protected from the wind behind the hedge.

© Frank Siemers 5 out of 10

Summery colors

Summery colors in the garden behind the house.

© Frank Siemers 6 out of 10

Old cookware

Old cookware hung up over the kitchen unit.

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Alcove, traditional bed niche

An alcove is a traditional bed niche.

© Frank Siemers 8 out of 10

Katja Just at home

Katja Just feels at home in the lovingly furnished Kate.

© Frank Siemers 9 out of 10

maritime decoration

In the window niche is maritime decoration, which perfectly reflects Katja Justs lifestyle.

© Frank Siemers 10 out of 10

the Hallig Hooge

The Hallig Hooge. Unthinkable for Katja Just to ever leave the small piece of land in the middle of the sea.

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A house on a hallig is more than a roof over your head, it is home, identity, vanishing point

On the first floor, the former hayloft, are two apartments. All this Katja Just wanted to take over in the year 2000. Together with her friend. But he made just before the move from Munich to Hooge a backlash. She was stunned, everything had gone well, he had started a business, wanted to take care of computers and internet services on Hooge, they both wanted to have children and see them growing up in the Hallig. The "separation on probation" was in fact already the end of the relationship. It was a shock, she says, she felt betrayed and lied to, she suffered two years after the breakup, she says. "Today I know it had to be, even when it was tough." Now, she said to herself then. She was 25, at first she felt alone on Hooge. There was what she had left: Munich, the great circle of friends, motorcycle tours, trips to the mountains, opera visits, the museums, the job in the commercial field of an airline. On the good side of Hooge were the approximately 100 Halligbewohner, including a few women, a dog for the walks on the dike. Instead of going to the opera, Katja Just joined the Hallig choir. Later came Maike, the Hallig hairdresser who became her friend.

Sometimes the two arrange to go to the girl's day, then take the ferry to Amrum for shopping. It is a life in which one waives many things, there is no doctor, no pharmacy, no gas station, and the ferry does not come, nothing comes, they are cut off from the rest of the world, what one needs, must be brought. Katja Just's working day consists of - among other things - gardening, cleaning the rooms, picking up and taking away guests, mowing the lawn, shoveling snow in winter. Instead of sitting in the beer garden with friends in the evening, she sits behind her house between lavender, lettuce and boxwood hedges. She paints the house herself, and she lets her show what she can not. "It has to be that way, especially if you live here alone as a woman," she says. "I was never the little girl who relies on the help of others."

Social life is different on a Hallig. You can drop by on a bunch of gossip, even if you are not friends, you visit each other at the big celebrations for birthdays, weddings, christenings. "You will not be invited here, you will only be unloaded," says Hooge. One needs the other in an emergency on this small survey in the sea. Everyone knows that, and so quarrels are usually settled quickly. It is a different cohesion than in the big city, it seems almost like fallen out of time, but may be necessary for survival, because land is always plan - and that's why on Hooge always around the house. How it can be protected when the water comes, how to help each other in such a situation.

A house on a hallig is more than a roof over your head, it is home, identity, vanishing point. A place for privacy is not. "There are no curtains," says Katja Just. "If I have a man in the house, or if I go for a walk with him, then everyone gets everything - sometimes things that do not happen at all." In general, the men question. She knows her, she is constantly asked. Do you have a? Are you looking for one? How do you find one here? Once she fell in love with a guest, he arrived, seemed spontaneously comfortable and seemed free when he was on the Hallig. She liked that, but in the end it did not work, she says. "He was self-employed, could have lived here, but the decision was too big for him." She does not want to go the other way, leaving the house and Hooge for a man, she says. She had to learn to let go. "Yet again." Their replacement family on Hooge, that's the twins Jan and Jörg, blond, blue-eyed, helpful, North Frisian to the bone.

The moments of happiness in her life have become different

She was with Jan in 1996, when she was visiting her parents on vacation on Hooge. They had a long-distance relationship for a year. "Come here," Jan said at the time, "I'll do the grocery store with you." - "But that was too early for me," says Katja Just. Today, the two are not a couple, even if this is of course talked about. "I know that," she says, "Friendships between men and women, they do not exist, they have something in common with each other, then people say, I get it, I try to let it bounce off me." Jan and she see each other almost every day, "I learn a lot from him," she says. "We are very close, and Jörg, the innkeeper of the inn 'Zum Seehund', is my best friend." The "seal" is the other house on Hooge that matters to her. She helped Jörg run the place, she is pragmatic and fast, where he is dreamy and hesitant. She painted the dining room with him, made everything brighter and more modern, when she realized he could not keep the restaurant. She was afraid that he would have to sell it in the end and move away, she thought that it can not be that one day the house will be without him and she will be without her best friend.She wrote an e-mail to the TV show "The Chefs," and then suddenly there was a team from the station, three cooks, and turned everything around "and kicked Jörg's ass," she says.

She wants the Hallig to stay the way it is, says Katja Just. She's in the local council and has worked to ensure that even in winter at least one restaurant has opened so that tourists can eat something. She wants to prevent many young boys from staying there on the mainland because there are no jobs and too little affordable housing here. That one day the school has to close, because no young families are there anymore. Those in turn stay away because there are more and more second homes and too little affordable housing on Hooge. Of those who try and pull on the Hallig, says Katja Just, many go back after about seven years: the winters are hard, there is no escape, and you have to be able to withstand yourself.

A house on a hallig is also a type issue, she says. Hooge is no longer mainland, but also not quite ocean. It is an interface between the two. A border area. One has to be content with oneself, endure the inner voice becoming louder, because it is not drowned out by external sounds, especially in winter. Katja Just says she has become calmer and calmer on the Hallig. Some things she still misses, the mountains, her motorcycle. The moments of happiness in her life have become different: When an old Hoogerin congratulated her on her birthday and she knew: Now you are really one of them. Sitting on her driveway with a milk coffee and looking at the surrounding holms and islands. When the ringed geese stop here in the spring on their way to Siberia in the spring. When Biike Burning takes place every year on the 21st of February, a kind of Easter bonfire that used to be said for the whalers of the islands and holms before they set out on a grand tour. All hoogers, including those living on the mainland, come together, and later kale is eaten together. But what Katja Just loves most here is the silence: "On Hooge you can hear the silence."

Pellworm | WDR Reisen (April 2024).