The Little Apple Tree
Has the time come to plant it?
“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree today.” Attributed to Martin Luther.
I. The occasion
In a podcast of the Austrian newspaper Der Standard, the author Sandra Navidi describes how the American military is being remodelled under Pete Hegseth. Part of her account is documented. By executive order, the Department of Defense now also bears the name “Department of War”. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Chief of Naval Operations were dismissed. The Pentagon threatened Senator Mark Kelly, a retired Navy officer, with consequences up to a court-martial after he and other members of Congress reminded soldiers that they are not obliged to follow unlawful orders. And since autumn 2025 the US military has been attacking boats in the Caribbean that are alleged to be smuggling drugs.
Another part is opinion presented as findings: that Trump, the evangelicals and the tech billionaires share a common goal, or that the situation can be explained by the complexes of individual men. Interpretations of this kind make the opponent ridiculous instead of explaining him.
What Hegseth stands for as a person we have described in “Petrov’s Failure and Eichmann’s Reliability” and in “Where Is Petrov?”. Here we are concerned with a different question, one that such news raises for many people: what does the individual do when he cannot change the larger course of things? The answer that has been ready to hand in Germany for eighty years is the little apple tree.
II. A sentence without Luther
The sentence does not appear in Luther’s writings, letters or table talk. The earliest known record is a circular letter from the Hessian pastor Karl Lotz dated 5 October 1944, written to friends from the Confessing Church. The church historian Martin Schloemann traced its path in an entire book in 1994: “Luthers Apfelbäumchen? Ein Kapitel deutscher Mentalitätsgeschichte seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg” (Luther’s apple tree? A chapter in the history of German mentality since the Second World War).
So the sentence was born in the autumn of 1944, when the war was lost and still had months to run. It became popular afterwards, amid the rubble and the fear of the atomic bomb. A word of comfort that borrowed the authority of a reformer, an authority it did not have.
Yet the attribution is not entirely wrong. Luther expected the end of the world within his lifetime and spoke of the “dear Last Day”, which he longed for. He took the end of the world seriously. And he went on writing, translating and preaching to the very end, as though the world would continue.
III. Two readings
The sentence can be understood in two ways, and they contradict each other.
The first reading is defiance. I do what I consider right, even though I will not live to see its effect. This is how someone acts who plants oaks that only his great-grandchildren will fell. It is how someone acted who laid the foundation stone of a cathedral in the Middle Ages that he would never see completed. It is how the inhabitants of Aneyoshi on Japan’s north-east coast act. After the tsunami of 1933 their ancestors set up a stone bearing the inscription that no houses should be built below that point. Their descendants kept to it, and in 2011 their houses were left standing.
The second reading is withdrawal. The world cannot be saved, so I will look after my garden. This is how Voltaire’s “Candide” ends: “Il faut cultiver notre jardin”, we must cultivate our garden. This is how the Biedermeier period lived after 1815, when the middle classes, their hopes of a constitution and freedom dashed, withdrew into their parlours. This is how someone lives today who sorts his rubbish and no longer goes to vote.
Whoever speaks of the little apple tree today usually means the second reading and passes it off as the first. The tree becomes a permission to take leave of the world, and it looks brave while doing so.
IV. Those who plant no trees
The sentence has adversaries who share the same premise and draw the opposite conclusion from it.
According to a survey from March 2026, one third of Americans expect to see the end of the world in their own lifetime. We described this in “The Collapsed Horizon”. In the rapture theology of many evangelicals, the faithful are taken up to God before the end, and what then happens to the earth is no concern of theirs. In “After Us the Deluge” we showed that Europe reaches the same result without any theology. And Peter Thiel has taken the dark Pauline word about the katechon, the restrainer of the end, and made it into a doctrine in which what is held back is no longer lawlessness but the law. That is the subject of “The Katechon”.
The premise is the same as in the apple tree sentence: tomorrow the world ends. The conclusion is the opposite. The one still plants today, because he does not know whether the end will come, and because what is right does not depend on it. The other plants nothing any more, because the end is coming anyway, and some help it along.
A military sworn to a certainty of faith is the instrument of the second attitude. It does not protect an order for the future; it carries out an expectation.
V. Erosion instead of the end of the world
This raises the question of the premise itself. Will the world end tomorrow?
“The Beast” contains the answer we still hold to be right: self-destruction comes not as a flash of lightning but as erosion. Not a last day, but slow weathering. Institutions are not overthrown, they are hollowed out. A ministry is given a second name, an officer is not promoted, a law keeps its wording and is no longer applied.
Against erosion, the reading of withdrawal helps least of all. Whoever withdraws into his own garden notices too late that erosion does not stop at the garden fence. The Dutch have known this for centuries. A dyke is not built once and then forgotten. It is inspected, repaired and raised every year, by people who may never experience the great flood.
In “Do We Only Build the Ark When the Flood Is Already Here?” we found that people almost always build the ark only once the water is rising. The little apple tree is its counterpart. It is planted before the water comes, and without any certainty that it will ever bear fruit.
VI. What planting means
At the end of “The Beast” it says that the best an outsider can do is to see, to document, to bear witness. That is not enough. Whoever bears witness looks on. Whoever plants acts, even if the act is small.
Mark Kelly prevented nothing. He reminded soldiers of a rule that is written in law and that no one looks up any more when it matters. In doing so he prepared something for a moment he himself does not control: for the officer who one day receives an order and then remembers. In 1983 Petrov hesitated at the decisive moment. Kelly has prepared the ground for those who will hesitate later. That is a little apple tree in the first reading.
Such trees are inconspicuous. A judge who gives careful reasons for a judgment, although he knows the next instance will overturn it. A teacher who teaches her class to check a source. An archivist who secures files before someone makes them disappear. A citizen who attends a council meeting at which nothing is decided. None of them stops the erosion. Each of them holds it back at one point.
VII. The answer
Has the time now come to plant the little apple tree?
The question assumes that there is a right moment, and that it arrives with the end. Neither is true. It is not the end that is announced, but decay. And against decay there is no moment, only the habit of planting again and again.
Whoever starts planting today is not too late. Whoever believes he was entitled to wait until today, because it was not necessary before, has not understood the sentence.
In the Rhineland they say: “Et hätt noch immer jot jejange”, it has always turned out fine. That is the little apple tree in the reading of withdrawal, and it holds true only as long as others have been planting.
Further reading: The Beast · Petrov’s Failure and Eichmann’s Reliability · Where Is Petrov? · The Collapsed Horizon · After Us the Deluge · The Katechon · Do We Only Build the Ark When the Flood Is Already Here? · Outlines of a Rhenish Philosophy