A Ginkgo Grows in Weimar

The Goethe Ginkgo
Photo by Robert Matthees

 

I once spent a summer in the East German town of Weimar. Well, it was only one month, but the weeks there were so special, they have grown into a whole summer in my mind. I was fifteen, my mother was attending a German teacher’s course, and my sister and I explored the streets of this historic town, steeped in art, music, and poetry.

Nearly every day we’d walk past one of Weimar’s most famous landmarks, located just a few blocks from our hotel: the Goethe Ginkgo Tree. Planted in 1820 by the German writer whose name it bears, the tree has grown to majestic proportions over the past two hundred years. It towered above the nearby buildings, its thick branches spreading wide to shade the street and the yard outside the Duchess Anna-Amalia Library.

I’d never seen a gingko before, and its oddly shaped leaves, twirling in the breeze on flat stems, always seemed to beckon to me.

During that month in Weimar, I also learned that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was not only one of Germany’s greatest poets and thinkers but also a respected scientist. He wrote a book on his observations of color phenomena and another on the metamorphosis of plants, in which he proposed the theory that the archetypal form of a plant can be seen in the shape of its leaves.

Photo by H. Zell

The ginkgo tree, with its uniquely shaped foliage, captured Goethe’s imagination. Only recently introduced into Europe from the Far East, the ginkgo began to feature prominently in 18^th-century garden design and appeared in many parks throughout Germany. The tree fascinated Goethe so much that he adopted the practice of giving dried ginkgo leaves to his friends.

His most famous association with the tree is in the love poem, “Ginkgo Biloba,” which he wrote for Marianne von Willemer, an Austrian actress and one of Goethe’s many female “muses.” Okay, he was in love with her, although she was more than 30 years his junior and married to another man at the time.

In 1815, Goethe read the finished poem to Marianne and some friends. A week later, when he met Marianne in the garden of Heidelberg Castle, he plucked two leaves from a ginkgo tree and later pasted them onto the page containing the verses. The poem was published in 1819 in Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan, a collection inspired by Persian literature.

Although the Heidelberg ginkgo that yielded these famous leaves no longer stands, the poem is on display at the Goethe Museum in Düsseldorf.

It is not surprising that Goethe found the ginkgo so inspiring, for these trees are quite remarkable. They are highly tolerant to environmental pollution, for which reason the town where I live decided to plant them as shade trees along our streets, and ginkgos were the first trees to thrive in Hiroshima after a nuclear bomb flattened the Japanese city. Fossils discovered in China show that ginkgos were around 200 million years ago, and the species has changed very little during that time.

With such a long lineage, it makes perfect sense that this ancient tree has medicinal properties that address the afflictions of aging. Ginkgo boosts the circulation, and with better blood flow to the brain, it improves mood, mental alertness, and memory (a kind of herbal fountain of youth). Studies have shown that the leaf extract can improve the symptoms of dementia.

Photo by Uryah

Goethe lived for only twelve years after the planting of Weimar’s most famous ginkgo tree so he never saw it grow to the great height and breadth that it has today. But he would still have been able to watch its transformation through the seasons, from new leaves unfurling in the spring, to deep green in the summer, to golden in the fall. And by immortalizing the ginkgo in his poem to Marianne, Goethe ensured that the tree would become the symbol of his home town for centuries to come.

A Tale of Three Misfits

Several decades ago, I enrolled in a university in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to study German language and literature with a focus on East German authors. When the time came for me to pick a topic for my Diplomarbeit, roughly the equivalent of an American thesis for a master’s degree, I had a ready topic. I wanted to explore the theme of social alienation in The New Sufferings of Young W., a 1973 novel by Ulrich Plenzdorf, an East German poet, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist.

You could have knocked my academic advisor over with a feather. Naively, I’d assumed I had freedom of choice in the matter but quickly realized my error when the professor offered a long list of more suitable candidates for me to study. Although Plenzdorf was not strictly a dissident author (his work was published, produced, and staged in the GDR), he nevertheless didn’t earn a lot of popularity points with the East German authorities, largely (although not exclusively) because of the novel I’d proposed for my Diplomarbeit.

First produced as a play in 1972 and turned into a novel the following year, The New Sufferings tells the story of Edgar Wibeau, a hydraulics apprentice who drops out of vocational school and lives for some months in a condemned cottage in Berlin, where he creates abstract paintings, listens to music, and sends taped accounts of his life and musings to his best friend, Willi. Edgar falls desperately in love with a young woman he nicknames Charlie, a kindergarten teacher who is engaged to be married to the much older Dieter.

The short novel (it’s only 84 pages long) is a modern retelling of The Sufferings of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers), a classic 18^th-century novel by the German writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749—1832). Not only do the two novels follow the same plot, but they are populated by characters who play equivalent roles and have similar names. In Goethe’s version, young Werther (Wibeau) is a sensitive artist who falls in love with Charlotte (Charlie), a woman betrothed to an older man named Albert (Dieter), and Werther pours out the sorrows of his unrequited love in letters to a confidante named Wilhelm (Willi).

In The New Sufferings, Edgar finds a copy of Goethe’s novel in the outhouse of the cottage where he’s staying. Although he reads the book and quotes extensively from it to anyone who’ll listen, he doesn’t identify with Werther. “I can’t imagine that anyone ever talked like that, even three centuries ago,” he says. Instead, he relates to another literary figure – Holden Caulfield, the hero of J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel, The Catcher in the Rye. Both young men rebel against the “phoniness” of social conventions and both feel youthful angst and alienation. In another parallel with Edgar’s story, Holden is expelled from prep school and hides out in New York while he tries to figure out how to break the bad news to his parents.

Like Holden Caulfield, Edgar has plenty of attitude to offer, much of it directed against the authoritarian society in which he lives. In a conversation with a movie producer, he criticizes “socialist realism,” the state-approved art form where entertainment plays second fiddle to the primary purpose of educating citizens to become better socialists. “I told him that a movie in which people are supposed to do nonstop learning can only be boring.”*

Edgar has plenty to say on the value of jeans as a fashion statement. Jeans, those symbols of the decadent West, are not just pants, they’re “an attitude.” In Edgar’s view they’re not to be worn by anyone over 25, an age group incapable of grasping the finer points of proper jeans wearing: low on the hips. “People over 25 are too dense to grasp that. Especially if they are card-carrying Communists who beat their wives.”

In publishing The New Sufferings, Plenzdorf’s timing was impeccable. Only one year before the premier of the stage version, the GDR relaxed its strict censorship rules, which had limited acceptable literature to the socialist realism category. Plenzdorf’s story was the first to openly criticize social conditions in the GDR, an idea so remarkable that the novel became the most widely discussed book among East German readers.

That social criticism is precisely what made Ulrich Plenzdorf’s novel an unacceptable focus for my thesis at the university. My studies there began ten years after the censorship rules changed, and most of my professors had been educated in a world where literature was meant to be edifying and not necessarily entertaining. My academic adviser likely couldn’t see a novel expressing the social dissatisfaction of Plenzdorf’s story as being worthy of academic analysis.

Although Edgar Wibeau has plenty of reason to rebel against the constraints of his world, The New Sufferings is not a wholesale condemnation of communism. Edgar merely objects to the heavy-handed way in which socialist ideals are applied. “No halfway intelligent person can have anything against communism these days,” he says. Like all the best literature, his story holds up a mirror to the society in which it was written and reflects a true-to-life image of that experience.

All citations of The New Sufferings of Young W. come from the 1979 translation by Kenneth P. Wilcox.