Joseph Roth: Goethe’s Oak in Buchenwald

First of all, Buchenwald was not always called Buchenwald, but Ettersburg. That was the name under which it was once celebrated among connoisseurs of literature: because Goethe used to meet Frau von Stein there, under a beautiful old oak. This tree stands under a preservation order. When they began to cut down trees in Buchenwald, or rather in Ettersburg, to make space for a kitchen for the inmates on the south side of the camp, and a laundry on the north side, that oak was the only one left standing. The oak of Goethe; the oak of Frau von Stein.

Symbolism has never been so crass as it is today. Writing one’s witty or savage little editorials for the papers has become like shelling peas. World history delivers the subjects free and gratis to one’s house, one’s pen, one’s typewriter. For an author, the penning of an editorial about the Third Reich is almost embarrassingly easy. The German oaks under which Goethe sat with Frau von Stein have survived – thanks  purely to a preservation order – in their place between the kitchen and the laundry of the concentration camp. Between the preservation order of long standing, and shall we say the destruction order that has recently broken out, well, let’s put it in the New German style, between laundry & ktchen stands the preservation oak of Fr. v. Stein & Goethe.

The inmates of the concentration camp march past this oak every day, or rather, they are marched past it. Now, oyez! The spreading of malicious falsehoods – or rather, horror stories – about the Buchenwald concentration camp is forbidden. It seems to me the time has come to correct these. To the best of my knowledge, therefore, not one of the inmates of the concentration camp has yet been tethered to the oak under which Goethe once sat with Frau von Stein, and which, thanks to the preservation order, is still growing; but to any number of other oaks, which this forest provides in abundance.

(from a manuscript in the Leo Baeck Institute, New York, marked, in another hand, ‘last article before his death on Monday, 22 May 1939.)