Otto Hedemann's books are an extraordinary example of his love for his small homeland and the beauty of nature. The son of a Danish man and a Polish woman - partly by coincidence and partly by his own choice - he tied his life to Polesie and the Vilnius region. He was particularly fond of the two districts of Braslaw and Dzialynsk, located in the north-eastern corner of the Second Polish Republic, at the junction of the then borders of Poland, Latvia and the USSR.

From Denmark to Polesie
In 1875, engineer Magnus von Hedemann (1850-1918), who came from a noble family in northern Denmark, came to Russia for work. As a qualified meteorologist, he ended up in eastern Polesia, near Gomel and Rzechitsa. There he managed a network of measuring stations in support of the large-scale land reclamation works then underway. Hedemann was connected to Polesie for the rest of his life. It was there that he met his wife, Jadwiga née Andrzejewska, whose family - significantly - came from the vicinity of Dzisna.

One of Magnus and Jadwiga Hedemann's two sons was Otto, who was born in 1887 in the village of Vasilevichi, situated between Rzechitsa and Mozyr, near the junction of the present-day borders of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. He spent his childhood in the "Polesie marshes", finished secondary school in Gomel, and it was only when he went to study in Kiev in 1906 that he had his first opportunity to get to know a region other than Polesie. For unclear reasons, however, he did not complete his history studies, and during the First World War he farmed on his father's farm in Polesie.

From Polesie to the Dvina
The Bolshevik Revolution took away all the Hedemanns' property and forced them to leave their small homeland as poor refugees. As a Danish citizen, Otton Hedemann only managed to leave the USSR as a repatriation in 1922. Together with his wife and daughters, he then ended up in his mother's hometown, in the Braslav district, where he worked as a teacher in rural primary schools. Interestingly, his brother decided to use his Danish passport and settled in Denmark, where he died after the Second World War.

Regionalism
Otton Hedemann, after living in the Braslav district for several years, moved to nearby Druja in the early 1930s. During this period he obtained several scholarships allowing him to take leave from school and undertake regular historical research, covering the history of the north-eastern corner of the then Vilnius province from the 16th to the 19th century.

His first scholarly book was History of the Braslav District, published in 1930. As he admitted in the introduction to this publication, the impetus for writing it came from his experiences working at school. He noted that "for children, the general concept of nation, state, time, even concepts as concrete as Warsaw, Krakow or prominent historical personalities, are abstractions". At the same time, the stories of the history of Braslav or the neighbouring villages and towns from the period of the national uprisings quoted during lessons aroused keen interest, and "children shared their impressions of history lessons with each other during breaks - a fact not previously recorded by the author in his teaching practice". It was precisely in his search for anecdotes from past centuries for teaching purposes that Hedemann began his archival research, which soon gained momentum and became the basis for writing a detailed monograph on the history of the region, covering both political and social history.

His next book was a history of two towns along the Dvina River - Dzisna and Druja, Magdeburg towns, published in 1934. In the introduction to this work, Hedemann formulated the purpose and importance of local history in beautiful words. He emphasised that alongside the important and large cities, "there existed and still exist those innumerable Oshmiany, Smorgon, Druje, Braslav and Mejszagoły, around which also swirled a multitude of smaller satellites - villages and hamlets, which [....provided shelter to the local population during the turmoil of war, brought them together in temples, fairs and markets, were the only available evidence of the achievements of the human spirit, and were the links connecting the grey communities with the notion of Nation and State. [...] We shall not [...] learn the average value of the whole nation from the resolutions of the Warsaw Sejm alone, nor from the revues on Saski Square, nor from the commercial transactions of the city of Vilnius with the bankers of the West [...]. We will know this value when we do not miss the cottage of the Lithuanian peasant and the stall-keeper of the town of Dniester at the same time. Only when we examine this greyness, and add to it the rainbow gleams of its highest expression, and mix everything carefully in a retort - only then do we get the right measure. [...] Just as a botanist who contented himself with examining slender palms, royal roses and slender nenufars, ignoring modest marigolds and cornflowers, will not know all the wonders of nature, so will the work of a researcher of the past be incomplete who, apart from London or Warsaw, cannot and will not dare to look into Braslav or Dzisna in order to search there for sorrows and joys, work and thoughts, the whole moral and physical atmosphere lived and breathed by people - our brothers.".

Importantly, The History of Braslav District and Dzisna and Druja are not just a collection of loose information about the life of the region, but also show its functioning in a wider context, the axis of which was the trade taking place for centuries along the Dvina and in the Baltic ports, with Riga at the forefront.

Nature
The originality of Otto Hedemann's work also lies in his comprehensive consideration of environmental history. Using the extensive archive searches carried out for the aforementioned regional monographs, he gathered information on the history of forest and water exploitation in former Poland in a separate place. This resulted in the book Dawne puszcze i wody (1934), which presents the history of the organisation of hunting, fishing, beekeeping, timber industry and nature conservation in the Vilnius region.

In the last years of his life, Hedemann planned to focus on researching the history of forests in the former Republic, going beyond Vilnius. Battling a fatal illness, he still managed to carry out archive queries and prepare a large part of his last book The history of the Białowieża Forest in pre-partition Poland, which was published posthumously in 1939.

Otton Hedemann died in 1937 in Vilnius and was buried in the Evangelical cemetery on Mount Bouffalova. His grave has not survived, as has the entire cemetery, destroyed by the Soviets in the 1960s and 1970s.