Germany’s Most Romantic Post Office Box

The Atlas Obscura Podcast - SiriusXM and Atlas Obscura

In northern Germany’s Dodower Forest, the Bridegroom's Oak—a 500-year-old tree—has served as a romantic post office since 1927, where strangers mail love letters to be delivered via a ladder to its knot hole. Journalist

Key takeaways

• The Bridegroom's Oak is the world’s only tree with an official postal address, established in 1927 after a forbidden romance between two teens in the 1890s.

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:02) We live in a world where it feels like we're always connected. Text, threads, socials, swiping right to meet someone new. But it seems like something's been lost. The idea of a chance meetup, an unexpected conversation, that feeling that anything could happen. Well, there is one place in northern Germany where this sense of possibility still exists. And it happens in an unexpected place. For decades, people have been mailing love letters to a single tree in the Daudauer forest called the Bridegroom's oak. The hope is that a stranger might read it and maybe even write back. Journalist Elliot Stein visited this romantic post office and talked to the mail carrier who used to deliver the letters and who one day found a letter that was addressed to him. Speaker 1: I'm Kelly McEvers and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Elliot Stein has traveled the world reporting on the people who are keeping rare and ancient traditions alive. He wrote about it in his book, Custodians of Wonder, Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive. And we are talking to him today. Thanks for being with us, Elliot. Welcome back. Thanks so much for having me. Okay, so how did you first come across the story of the Bridegroom's Oak? I was living in Germany, and I took a trip up to Hamburg, which is a city in the north of Germany, and I overheard a person kind of whispering to their friend about this tree an hour or so outside of the city where people mail love letters. And so as a journalist, your ears kind of perk up and I thought to myself, I have to learn as much as I can about this and visit it. So I kind of craned my neck a little bit to hear them better. And the little German that I do understand, I was able to piece together enough clues to understand where the thing was. And that kind of sent me down a rabbit hole of German newspapers. So about a month later, just before Valentine's Day, I took a train up and then plotted through the forest and saw this tree for myself and was able to meet its most famous mail carrier, a gentleman named Carl Heinz Martens. Well, just kind of give us a sense of where we are and kind of paint a picture of it. Like how exactly you got to the tree. Yeah, so the tree is located outside of a town called Oitin. and Oitin is not far from the northern coast of Germany, kind of facing the Baltic Sea, facing Scandinavia and Denmark. And it's this sort of idyllic German place. There are windmills everywhere and cobblestone streets. And about a 15-minute drive outside of Oitin, or the town center, is this forest, this expansive old-growth forest called the Dodower. And it's there where six, days a week for nearly 100 years, a lone postal carrier has crunched through the leaves, and he carries a stack of handwritten love letters written by starry-eyed singles. And as you go deep into the forest, you'll notice that there is a 10-foot-tall ladder, and the postman or woman will scale this ladder and deliver these handwritten love notes to the not hole of this 500-year-old oak tree. And today the oak tree is surrounded by a fence to keep people from damaging its roots. It's pretty old and fragile. And so as you crunch through there yourself as a visitor, and obviously anyone can go through the forest, you come across this tree that's kind of all by itself, and you immediately understand, okay, that's the one. And if you stay there long enough, and if you're at the right time of day, you can see the postal carrier crunch through the forest, him or herself, and scale the ladder. Wow. Okay, so just to be clear, like, it has an official postal address that you mail it to somewhere off-site and then he delivers it from that address to the tree. It is the only tree in the world that has its own mailing address. It's so cool. Believe it or not, there was another one. And these two trees were kind of ceremoniously wed, but then the other tree got a fungal infection and died. And so the bridegroom's oak is now a lone widow, and it has the distinction of being the only tree you can send the letter to. Okay, as you said, you talked to the mail carrier, you know, who did this route, right, which included the tree for 20 years. Talk about him and what drew him to doing this route. It's a fantastic guy. His name is Carl Heinz Martens. He's now in his 80s. and you never would have guessed that Carl would sign up for this route so many years ago. When he, he moved to Oitin because of a woman. They were married, and it didn't work out. And so Carl was kind of a, he was a divorcee. He had given up on love. He spent most of his nights bowling with his mail carrier male friends. and then one day this route opened up and he signed up for it. And he did this for 20 years. He faithfully delivered these love letters to a tree after giving up on love himself. It's kind of the, you know, Germany's most romantic job. You'd wonder why would you even want