In the Garden of Beasts

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin is the third of Erik Larson's popular history books that I've read. Like the first two, The Devil in the White City (2003) and Thunderstruck (2006), Larson's latest book compellingly tells a true story that is "stranger than fiction."

This book centers on William Dodd, American Ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937, and his family, especially his daughter, Martha, as they live in Berlin while Adolf Hitler rises to power. Larson is curious how the Dodds reacted as they witnessed first hand the Nazi Party seize complete control of Germany. He especially wonders, for example, if the ambassador could have helped to prevent the horrors that were about to envelope Europe by insisting that President Franklin Roosevelt take a stronger stand against Hitler and the National Socialist Party.

In the summer of 1933, as FDR struggled to get a recalcitrant Congress to pass his economic proposals to combat the worsening Great Depression, at least four men passed on his invitation to be Ambassador to Germany. Roosevelt finally offered the position to a historian of modest renown, currently teaching at the University of Chicago, William Dodd, who reluctantly accepted what everyone in Washington knew would be an extremely difficult job. Dodd packed up his family, including his 24-year-old soon-to-be divorced daughter, and moved to Berlin.

That daughter, Martha, a literary editor at the Chicago Tribune, had had a number of tempestuous romantic relationships over the previous few years, including an affair with Carl Sandberg and a flirtation with Thornton Wilder, and her father hoped that life abroad would settle her into adulthood. But Martha, enchanted by the bright lights of Berlin, shrugged off as “rumors” the talk about concentration camps springing up to house communists and Jews and threw herself into the nightlife. She took a number of lovers, including at least one senior Nazi official as well as a Soviet spy. After the Night of the Long Knives, however, she, like her father, would resolve to work against the Nazi cause.

In addition to telling the story of the Dodds, Larson provides background to life in Germany at this time. For example, he explains why the laws restricting Jews from certain professions didn't matter to American tourists and why even many Jews thought that the threats made by Nazis were primarily bluster. He also details the origins of the ubiquitous Nazi salute, the mandatory sterilization of "defectives" laws, and invention of the deadly Zyklon B gas used in the concentration camps.

Larson's book, like the other two that I've read, is narrative history at its best, and I definitely recommend it.