In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Innocents Abroad in Hitler’s Berlin Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin (2011) recounts the experiences of William E. Dodd, America’s new ambassador to Germany, and his 24-year-old daughter Martha living in Berlin near the Tiergarten (the huge park whose name means the Garden of Beasts), especially during their first year beginning in June 1933. In his prologue, Larson explains that he tried writing a “more intimate” book than “another grand history of that age” like, I suppose, William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960). Larson wanted “to reveal that past world through the experience and perceptions of my two primary subjects, father and daughter, who upon arrival in Berlin embarked on a journey of discovery, transformation, and, ultimately, deepest heartbreak.” Larson, then, depicts how the scholar, Jeffersonian democratic farmer, and “accidental diplomat” Dodd and his free-spirited and free-loving daughter were “two innocents. . . complicated people moving through a complicated time, before the monsters declared their true nature.” It’s fascinating to read Dodd’s initial attempts to remain objective and neutral, hoping to influence the German regime in a more civilized direction by steadfastly representing American values to them, as well as Martha’s initial infatuation with the Nazi revolution and the seemingly handsome, healthy, and happy Germans she saw everywhere. The major movement of Larson’s book then demonstrates how their first year in Berlin dramatically changed the optimistic views of father and daughter as the beasts in the garden (the Tiergarten park near their rented home serving as a metaphor for Berlin and Germany) began revealing their irrational, ruthless, arrogant, and malevolent natures. People familiar with that period of German and world history will be familiar with historical highlights like the Reichstag arson trial, the referendum on withdrawing from the League of Nations, the Night of the Long Knives, and the series of laws curtailing Jewish civil and human rights. I had not known about the many attacks on American citizens who made the mistake of not performing the Nazi salute when storm troopers paraded by. But the most interesting things I learned from Larson’s book concern the personality and role in events of Dodd and his daughter Martha. She was a passionate, independent, naïve, poetic, and romantic woman (engaging in affairs with American writers, French diplomats, Russian spies, Gestapo chiefs, and the like). It was fascinating to read about things like the Dodd family’s increasing and well-founded paranoia that their home phones were bugged, that their servants couldn’t be trusted, and that they were living in an insane country, so that even though they didn’t fear for their physical safety (not even the Nazis would dare to harm the American ambassador or his family), they lived in an intense state of tension making it difficult to converse or sleep. For Dodd this was exacerbated by his realization that members of his own staff were spying on him for his American State Department enemies, members of the “Pretty Good Club” of elite Ivy League millionaires for whom the foreign service and state department was a private boys’ club critical of Dodd’s attempts to rein in expenses and luxuries and of his failures to be sufficiently pro-German and anti-Jewish. The best part of this book, then, are the intimate details narrated through the letters and diaries and memoirs and so on of the Dodds that tell a true, appalling, and moving story. Larson writes plenty of witty and neat lines of his own, like, “That tincture of guilt only parents know how to add.” But perhaps he tries too hard to make his book as page-turningly suspenseful as a novel via a bit too much dramatic foreshadowing, the payoffs of which are often not so potent, as when he says, “In light of what was to happen a few years hence, Dodd’s crowing about his own driving prowess can only raise a chill,” or “Up until now she had only seen her father with tears in his eyes once, upon the death of Woodrow Wilson, whom he counted as a good friend. There would be one other occasion, but that was to come in a few more years time.” And there is an odd moment when Larson sympathizes with Dodd’s attempt to escape the insanity and stress of Berlin by working on his never-finished life work, a definitive and comprehensive multi-volume history of the American south: “Late that afternoon he devoted to quiet hours to his Old South, losing himself in another, more chivalrous age.” I wonder if the slaves would’ve found it a more chivalrous age... The audiobook reader Stephen Hoye is professional and capable. People interested in WWII history focusing on Nazi Germany written from an unusual and personal point of view, that of the innocents abroad William and Martha Dodd, should like this book. View all my reviews
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