Goethe Oak (or Goethes Oak), is a name given to a number of oak trees in Germany that are referred to in this way because they allegedly bear some sort of connection to the poet

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. His works include plays, poetry, literature, and aesthetic criticism, as well as t ...

History

Perhaps the most famous one is the oak tree near

Weimar Weimar is a city in the state of Thuringia, Germany. It is located in Central Germany between Erfurt in the west and Jena in the east, approximately southwest of Leipzig, north of Nuremberg and west of Dresden. Together with the neighbouri ...

, Germany, on the Ettersberg, at the foot of which was the castle of

Charlotte von Stein Charlotte Albertine Ernestine von Stein (also mentioned as ''Charlotta Ernestina Bernadina von Stein'' ), born von Schardt; 25 December 1742, Eisenach – 6 January 1827, Weimar, was a lady-in-waiting at the court in Weimar and a close friend to ...

. The oak, in the middle of a beech forest, is named thus because it is supposedly the tree under which Goethe wrote " Wanderer's Nightsong", or, alternatively, the location where he composed the

Walpurgisnacht Walpurgis Night (), an abbreviation of Saint Walpurgis Night (from the German ), also known as Saint Walpurga's Eve (alternatively spelled Saint Walburga's Eve), is the eve of the Christian feast day of Saint Walpurga, an 8th-century abbess ...

passages of his ''

Faust Faust is the protagonist of a classic German legend based on the historical Johann Georg Faust ( 1480–1540). The erudite Faust is highly successful yet dissatisfied with his life, which leads him to make a pact with the Devil at a crossroa ...

''. The fate of the oak became in due course associated with the fate of Germany: if the one were to fall, so would the other. According to the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, the name 'Goethe Oak' was simply an epithet made up by the inmates of Buchenwald camp in commemoration of the walks Goethe was known to have made in the area. The large, old tree had previously been labeled the ''Dicke Eiche'' (English:"thick oak") on maps of the area.

The end of the Buchenwald oak

The beech forest was cleared in 1937 to make way for the Buchenwald concentration camp. Originally the camp was to be called ''KL Ettersberg'' ("KL" for ''Konzentrationslager''), but this was abandoned because the Ettersberg name was so closely connected to the life of Goethe. The tree stood in the center of the camp, and is reputed to have served also for the hanging and torture of prisoners. The tree was hit by an Allied incendiary bomb on 24 August 1944 and burned all night long. It is preserved (being cast in concrete under the auspices of the DDR government, which also laid a plaque saying "Goethe Eiche") and is part of the Buchenwald memorial. For the SS guards and the prisoners, the tree held two completely different meanings: for the SS it was a link to the Germany they thought they represented, but for the prisoners the tree pointed to a different Germany from the one they experienced in the camp. According to

Amos Oz Amos Oz ( he, עמוס עוז; born Amos Klausner; 4 May 1939 – 28 December 2018) was an Israeli writer, novelist, journalist, and intellectual. He was also a professor of Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. From 1967 onw ...

, the incorporation of the oak in the camp and its subsequent destruction are evidence that the Nazis destroyed their own heritage,. In ''Der Totenwald'', camp survivor Ernst Wiechert recalls standing under the oak and reflecting on the two Germanies it represented — what later scholars would call the "''Januskopf Deutschlands''", the Weimar-Buchenwald dichotomy. The tree gave its name to another book by a survivor, Pierre Julitte's ''L'Arbre de Goethe'' (1965). The oak was sketched by

Léon Delarbre Léon Delarbre (1889–1974) was a painter, museum curator, and World War II resistance fighter. After a career as a museum conservator and teacher in his hometown of Belfort, he joined the French resistance in 1941. Arrested in 1944, he was h ...

, who used to sit under its "charred limbs" and compose poetry.

Other Goethe oaks

Another Goethe oak is in

Krásný Dvůr Castle Krásný Dvůr Castle (german: Schönhof) is a Baroque chateau in Krásný Dvůr, North Bohemia, Czech Republic. It has a English-style landscape park and a garden inspired by that of Versailles. History The first records of Krasný Dvůr da ...

in Bohemia (today in the Czech Republic), estimated to be 1000 years old. The Arnsberg Forest Nature Park in Sauerland claims one as well (a beech named for Friedrich Schiller fell victim to a storm in 2007).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Goethe oak Buchenwald concentration camp Individual oak trees Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Individual trees in Germany