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.

Unfamiliar Fishes

Sarah Vowell is my kind of woman: sharp-witted and on the left politically, with a deadpan sense of humor and a possessor of a large vocabulary. I'm not much of a radio listener so I've rarely heard her commentaries on NPR, but I've enjoyed her appearances on The Daily Show and have found three of her books to be well-written and thoughtful critiques of America and its citizens.

For example, in The Wordy Shipmates (2008), which is about the Pilgrims and their Massachusetts Bay Colony, Vowell analyzes the irony implicit in a group of people fleeing England because of repression but then being so intolerant toward the natives of the New World and any Europeans who didn't believe what they believed. Similarly, in Assassination Vacation (2005), an eccentric sort of travelogue, Vowell visits sites associated with the presidents who have been killed while in office (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy), which leads her to speculate about what makes America such a country of violence.

Vowell’s most recent book, Unfamiliar Fishes (2011), describes a trip to Hawaii for a vacation. While there, she tours the royal palace, and, on that same day in December 2003, U.S. troops capture Saddam Hussein in Iraq. This coincidence makes her realize that America has always been in the business of "regime change." Her new book, as she says in her introduction, tells the story about how the U.S. spent seventy-eight years "Americanizing" Hawaii—from sending the first missionaries to "civilize" the islands in 1820 to formal annexation in 1898. (The latter year, of course, also represents the peak of American imperialism as the U.S. declared war on Spain and ended up seizing Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam.) It's not a story that makes you proud to be an American.

Most of Unfamiliar Fishes is a detailed history of the American missionaries and whalers who began visiting the Sandwich Islands, as they were known until the 1850s, for religious and commercial reasons. These two groups, however, were rivals for the islands as the missionaries sought to convert the natives and the whalers sought some R&R while on shore leave. "Imagine, Vowell says, "if the Hawaii Convention Center in Waikiki hosted The Value Voters Summit and the Adult Entertainment Expo simultaneously—for forty years." As one could imagine, the two cannot possibly co-exist in harmony, and the only reason the conflict between them ended was the discovery, in the mid 19th century, that petroleum was a much cheaper alternative to whale oil, which led to the collapse of the whaling industry (the only reason, indeed, that the whales weren't hunted to extinction) and the triumph of missionary culture in Hawaii.

Although most Hawaiians appreciated how the missionaries contributed to a higher standard of living (particularly with their emphasis on public schools), they lamented the loss of independence that came with American annexation in 1898. Vowell, in fact, takes her title from a metaphor used by one 19^th-century Hawaiian writer to describe the situation of his native land: “If a big wave comes in, large and unfamiliar fishes will come in from the dark ocean, and when they see the small fishes of the shallows they will eat them up.”

Like her earlier books, Unfamiliar Fishes shines a light on a part of American history that is worth exploring, and, as such, I recommend Vowell’s book.