Goethe’s Oak and Mohyla’s Linden: History from an Arboreal Perspective

The bus ride from Weimar to Buchenwald is uncomfortably brief: urban scenery is replaced by lush greenery in no time, leaving little possibility to prepare for the visit to the infamous Nazi concentration camp (and later Soviet NKVD prison camp). I arrived in Buchenwald on the sunny morning of the Day of Liberation (Tag der Befreiung), May 8 2023, to find a placid idyll of blooming nature that contrasts sharply with the buildings still standing and the stories they hold. My first impression of the prison camp was that of windswept barracks lost in the woods. Then I spotted a huge tree stump between the crematorium and the storage depot. This stump is what eventually helped me to bridge the gap between the natural and human histories of Buchenwald. It is Goethe’s Oak. Even as a lifeless bole, it tickles my imagination with its conceptual challenges. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe writes in The Metamorphosis of Plants, “Every plant unto thee proclaimeth the laws everlasting, every flower speaks louder and louder to thee.” But this one in particular speaks loudly to me from both the remote and the recent pasts. Plants, as I have learned, retain memories, along with the capacity for learning and anticipation. Is there a way to translate all of this into a message comprehensible for humanity? Visiting the site with Ukrainian photographer Olena Grom, who escaped the occupation of Bucha but later returned home to photograph and talk to survivors, I cannot resist resorting to comparison. The words “genocide,” “atrocity,” “violence,” and “victims” fill our conversation, though we utter them with caution. We doubt ourselves, uncertain about the legitimacy of these comparisons, yet find it impossible to ignore the similarities. Before long I find myself trying to craft a modality to engage with what I have seen and learned in Buchenwald. This is when Petro Mohyla’s linden tree in Kyiv, struck by lightning on May 12 2022, comes to mind. The wreckage of a 400-year-old tree, allegedly planted by a famous Metropolitan to celebrate the partial reconstruction of the Desiatynna Church (Church of the Tithes, built by Grand Prince Volodymyr in the late 900s), augured little good. Barely a month earlier, on March 31, Russian troops had withdrawn from Bucha, and the details of the shocking massacre they had perpetrated are still being uncovered and processed. Ukrainian society and the world at large refused to believe that such atrocities are possible in twenty-first century Europe; the slogan associated with the Holocaust, “Never again,” proved premature. Innocent people were tortured, raped, humiliated, and killed in their homes for the simple fact that they were Ukrainian. In this essay, I propose a mental exercise for overcoming “plant-blindness,” defined by Giovanni Aloi as “our cultural inability to conceive plants beyond the prefixed cultural schemata.” I will suggest looking at Goethe’s Oak and Mohyla’s Linden not just as resources or aesthetic objects, as props in effect, but as witnesses which embody the memory of historical events. In this capacity, the two trees will be juxtaposed and compared through a nonhuman, and specifically arboreal, lens. Like contemporary art, with its ability to problematize and unhinge consensus narratives, the selected trees might enable alternative modalities of perception on history—modalities that shed light on atrocities, from the Holocaust to current wars, and also speak to longer histories of engagement between humans and trees.