The Splittereiche

This oak is named after its wounds. On the nights of 13 and 14 February 1945 the bombing of Dresden reached the Grosser Garten, and splinters tore open one side of the trunk along roughly eight metres of its height. The tree survived. The damage is still there and still obvious, which is how it came to be called the Splittereiche, the splinter oak. It was already old when that happened. An assessment made in the 2010s put it at between 250 and 300 years, a range nobody has narrowed since and which is itself a decade out of date by now. It stands twenty-seven metres tall with a trunk over six metres round, out on open lawn a short walk south of the Mosaikbrunnen, so you see the whole shape of it from a distance before you get to the scar. On 8 May 2017, the seventy-second anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, a memorial plaque went up beside it carrying a line from Mark Twain: time may heal all wounds, but it is a lousy cosmetician. The year after, the city fitted metal sheeting over the damaged flank, because visitors picking at the old injury were making it worse. We have not found it listed individually in Dresden's register of natural monuments. It stands inside a protected historic park instead, and it is the tree people in that park come to find.