The Kaisereiche

Someone tried to kill this oak as a political protest, and Berlin planted a replacement within weeks. The original Kaisereiche went into the ground on 22 March 1879, planted by a local publisher to mark Kaiser Wilhelm I's 82nd birthday and golden wedding anniversary, at what was then a traffic circle on the edge of the new suburb of Friedenau. In November 1883, five years after two separate assassination attempts on the Kaiser had given Chancellor Bismarck his pretext for the Anti-Socialist Laws, someone damaged the tree badly enough that it needed full replacement, an act read at the time as a protest against those same laws. The oak standing at the corner of Rheinstraße and Moselstraße today is that replacement, which makes it roughly 143 years old rather than the 147 the original planting date would suggest, a small but honest distinction most retellings skip. Berlin protects it as a natural monument, and in 2004 a Hohenzollern descendant, Franz Friedrich Prinz von Preußen, unveiled a plaque marking 125 years since the first tree went in. The intersection has no official street name of its own, but Berlin's transit map still labels the bus stop and taxi rank here Kaisereiche, a small act of memory that has outlasted the publisher, the Kaiser, and the empire both men served.