The Lampshade

The Lampshade

In the fall of 1827, as he was completing his masterwork Faust, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, greatest of all German writer, took a walk through the Ettersberg forest near his home in Weimar. “This is a good place to be,” the seventy-eight-year-old Goethe told his secretary and biographer, Johann Peter Eckermann, as the two men paused to admire the view. “Of late I have thought it would be the last time I should look down from here on the kingdoms of the world, and their splendor. We tend to shrink in domestic confinement. Yet, here we feel great and free…as we always out to be.”

One hundred and ten years later, in the spring of 1937, Theodor Eicke, the Obergruppenführer of the Waffen-SS Totenkopf Death’s Head division, and Fritz Sauckel, soon t o be in charge of the largest contingent of forced workers since the African slave trade, sought to pay tribute to Goethe. As they cleared the Ettersberg forest for the construction of the Buchenwald camp, where fifty-six thousand people would die before April 1945, they ordered that one large oak be left standing. This was said to be Goethe’s Eiche, or Goethe’s Oak, the very tree under which the great poet had written his great work. The camp, at the time the largest in the Reich, was built around the tree. It was an arbitrary decision on Eicke’s part. After all, there was no way of knowing which oak Goethe had actually sat under; the Ettersberg is full of the trees. Indeed, in Conversations of Goethe, Eckermann recounts how Faust’s author carved his initials into not an oak but a beech tree, the dominant species in the forest (the name Buchenwald, chosen by SS leader Heinrich Himmler means beech forest).  But a beech is a spindly thing compared to an oak. Its roots do not plumb as deeply into the earth, its wood is not as hard, its fruit is not so plentiful.

For the Nazis, it was important to lay claim to the poet’s legacy. Hitler himself had sat beside these same trees. The Führer loved—and was loved in—Weimar and the Thuringia state that surrounds it. A grand hub of Western culture for three centuries, onetime home to Martin Luther, Friedrich von Schiller, Franz Liszt, Johann Sebastian Bach, Friedrich Nietzche, Richard Strauss, Paul Klee, Wasily Kandinksy, Hector Berlioz, Arthur Schopenhaur, Walter Gropius, Rudolf Steiner, Marlene Dietrich, and Richard Wagner, Weimar was an early center of Nazi popularity. In 1926, following Hitler’s release from prison after the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, when he was prohibited from speaking in much of the country, Weimar welcomed him. Before becoming chancellor, he often addressed crowds in front of his beloved Hotel Elephant. In 1933 the Nazis won a majority of the votes in the area. It was here that the Hitlerjugend, the Hitler Youth, was organized. To the Führer, the Thuringian hills, and the great works produced there, were “the embodiment of the German spirit.”