1936 Olympics: The Leader’s Oak in Koreatown

At the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, the three American athletes won bronze, silver and gold. As they stand on the podium, Johnson, like all gold medalists that year, is presented with a potted oak sapling. As “The Star-Spangled Banner” sounds, the three jumpers extend their arms toward the leader’s box in the Bellamy Salute (an American national salute with the right arm outstretched but the hand open). But Hitler had already left them. Depending on the source and interpretation, supposedly because the games lasted too long that day.

Or supposedly because Adolf Hitler didn’t want to invite a black man into his box, as he had done with the previous winners. One thing is clear: In Leni Riefenstahl We see the jump in the Nazi propaganda film “Olympia – Festival of the Nations”, but not the award ceremony. One thing is clear: This was followed by a reprimand of the International Olympic Committee to Hitler. (Whereupon Hitler only brought the German victors into his closet.) One thing is also clear: Back in the USA, the Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt only invited the whites among the US Olympians to the White House. Only Barack Obama tried to make amends for this by inviting the remaining relatives.

Change of scene: The Museion in South Tyrol

In the Museion in Bolzano, South Tyrol Small oak seedlings in radiant boxes stretch their friendly, rounded leaf edges into the violet UV light. Like aliens, their glass roots lounge in a nutrient solution. Thick acorns keep the plants in the bulbous glasses balanced. The artist Christian Kosmas Mayer brought them here. A video installation on the wall. Footage of a drone flight.

A group of young people around a lounge chair on an American concrete area under a gnarled, tall European oak tree. The drone moves away, its gaze examines the crown, the canopy, the surroundings, the neighborhood. A solitaire in the middle of Koreatown, Los Angeles, USA.

Freestanding can Quercus robur, This is the botanical name of the common oak, developing a trunk circumference of up to 12 meters and a height of up to 40 meters. The “German oak” is the most widespread type of oak in Central Europe. It is little wonder that the tree is called “English” or “British Oak” in English and oak leaves also appear in national iconographies of France and Italy.

Quercus-Plantings as a gesture of remembrance and honor became widespread in Germany as early as the 19th century: as Luther oaks in 1883 for the 400th birthday of the reformer, later as imperial oaks, Bismarck oaks, Hindenburg oaks and in 1933, for Martin Luther’s 450th birthday, again in his honor – and in honor of the new leader as Hitler oaks.

Just as the intellectual seeds of the National Socialist ethos should spread in all directions, the German Reich should also take root in the world. It was the idea of ​​the Berlin gardener Hermann Rothe to present the competition winners with a potted “German oak” in addition to the gold medal. There is a certain irony in history that the African American Jesse Owens was the only one to bring four of the 124 trees back to the States.

High jump champion Corny Johnson also took his seedling back to Los Angeles and planted it in the garden of his parents’ house, number 1156 S Hobart Blvd – today’s Koreatown. In 1938 he ended his sporting career, earned his living as a postal boatman, later joined the army and died of pneumonia just ten years after setting his Olympic record, aged just 33.

The house and its oak became the property of his brother, from whom the Mexican immigrant Tomas family bought it. The German artist Christian Kosmas Mayer, born in 1976, came across the stories of the Olympia oaks during a residency program in Los Angeles in 2014 and began searching for their whereabouts. Through small-scale archival work, he found out about Johnson’s house – and drove past it.

The family was a bit shocked, says Mayer, when he, the German, asked about the origin of the oak. Nevertheless, a kind of friendship quickly developed. The family reported on their life with the tree and Mayer filmed. He grew the seedlings in nutrient solution from acorns from the tree, which are now floating in the Bolzano museum.

The oak as a global citizen

Because the European tree, confused by California’s climate, rarely ripens its fruit, the artist first had to work with a laboratory to breed artificial offspring. For reasons of plant protection, he secretly smuggled them into Europe: A harmful fungus that is common in North America prohibits the import of common oak – no matter how sterile it is cloned.

The oak children and Mayer’s video work from 2017 are now being shown together with historical Olympic torches, built into a large installation by the South Tyrolean artist Sonia Leimer, in the Museion in Bolzano – halfway between Milan and Cortina, where the 25th Winter Olympics are now starting.

And the old tree? The Tomas family sold the house in 2019, reports Mayer. An entrepreneur wanted to “develop” the site. Neighbors informed the artist. He did not hesitate and, together with curator Susan D. Anderson of the California African American Museum and the botanical Huntington Gardens, worked with the LA Monuments Office to preserve a house and building. Successfully.

The ensemble has been a listed building since 2022. If you ask Mayer why this oak of all things shouldn’t be felled, his answer is clear: “It tells of resilience: of how one puts down roots, despite all contradictions. About remaining resistant and continuing to grow according to one’s own conditions. In it, the optimism of life is mixed with a warning: how easily even the living can be turned into a symbol, appropriated and reinterpreted, and how important it is to counter such stories with the actual, complex history.”

Mayer has not yet planted a living offspring – the context of the immovable gesture must be well chosen.