The Jahn Oak of Offenbach

This oak was planted for the hundredth birthday of a sports ground in Berlin. In 1811 the first German Turnplatz, an open-air gymnastics ground, opened in the Hasenheide, and a century later the gymnasts of Offenbach marked the date with a tree. A low stone at the trunk still says so: in memory of the opening of the first German Turnplatz in the Hasenheide in Berlin, 1811, 19 June, 1911. The planting followed a gymnastics display on the Bieberer Berg, after which every club in Offenbach and Bürgel merged into the Offenbacher Turnerschaft. The register dates it to the winter of 1911 to 1912, so it is about 115 years old. Then the oak took on a heavier job. On 10 August 1928, the 150th birthday of the gymnastics pioneer Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, whose name it carries, a second stone was unveiled beside it: a pyramid-shaped boulder brought from the Taunus, for 211 club members killed in the First World War. Its metal plaque has since gone. The scars where it was fixed have not. The tree is no giant: a wide, well-formed crown marking a road junction, made natural monument number 11 in July 1988. Nobody has published its girth or height, and the newest dated photograph we know of is from 2018. If you have put a tape round it, tell us. It stands on the corner of Gutenbergstraße and Starkenburgring in Offenbach, free and on public ground, an S-Bahn ride from Frankfurt.