Maureen's Reviews > In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

Eric Larsen has a talent for taking a big event, like the Galveston flood of 1900 (Isaac's Storm), the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 (The Devil in the White City) , or the implementation of the transatlantic cable (Thunderstruck) and combining it with a compelling individual's story. He uses the broader context of historical events and personalizes it, so that, in effect, the parts become greater than the sum of the whole.

In his latest book, In the Garden of Beasts, Larson takes on the rise to power of Adolph Hitler and the Nazis in Germany, as seen through the prism of William E Dodd, U.S. Ambassador to Germany from July of 1933 to December of 1937, and his family. Through their experiences, the reader can see their incredible naivete, and unwillingness to believe that such vile events could be unfolding.

Dodd took a job that no one else wanted. FDR had been trying for months to find a new ambassador to Germany. Finally, when Dodd's name was suggested, FDR offered him the job. In many ways, Dodd was an odd choice as ambassador: although he had studied in Leipzig as a student and was at least literate in German, Dodd had no old family money, no political connections, and loathed double-dealing and pretense of any sort. He was a plain-spoken fellow who had worked his way up from humble beginnings as a farm boy to assuming a professorship at the University of Chicago.

Dodd was unhappy in academia. He did not have time to work on his magnum opus, a multi-volume work, entitled The Old South. For a long time, Dodd had felt that he was destined to be more than a college professor, and so he quietly circulated his name in the State Department, seeking a modest diplomatic posting. He thought that with a quiet posting somewhere, he would have time to write, and also more time to spend with his family.

Family was everything to him, so Dodd also saw an ambassadorship as a way to reunite his wayward clan. His wife Martha, also known as Mattie, was loving and supportive, as were his grown children, Martha and William Jr., also known as Bill. Bill and Martha had drifted away from home, and Dodd saw the prospect of life in a foreign country as a way to lure them back into the fold. At the time of his appointment, Martha was working as a reporter at the Chicago Tribune and Bill was a history teacher and "a scholar in training." Martha was in the process of extricating herself from (what she thought was) a secret marriage, while Bill showed little initiative to aspire to much of anything.

Seeing himself as a Jeffersonian Democrat, Dodd sought a sort of downhome equality that clashed with the ambassadorial profile of the age. Dodd thought that embassies should be modestly run and that delegations representing the United States should make an effort to understand the culture and history of their host countries. This stood in stark opposition to the majority of ambassadors, who were incredibly wealthy and saw the diplomatic corps as, "a pretty good club," where they had the opportunity to throw lavish parties, come to work at ten in the morning, and consort with the elite of the ruling classes.

Dodd swore that he would live on his ambassadorial salary of $17,500. He meant to be a voice of moderation, both in the embassy setting and in his dealings with the government of Hitler and Hindenburg. To that end, he went to the lengths of even transporting the old family Chevrolet to Germany for use as his official transportation, eschewing the Daimlers and Benzs that were de rigeur in ambassadorial circles.

Once the family arrived in Berlin, they had to find housing. After some weeks of searching, they took a lease on an imposing house at Tiergartenstrasse 27a. The house was the home of a Jewish private banker and his family, who continued to occupy the attic. Meanwhile, the Dodds had the run of the bottom three floors of the lushly appointed home, which included a ballroom, a library, and a sufficient number of other rooms to see to the needs of an ambassador's family.

Dodd liked the house because the rent was reasonable, and it was within walking distance of the American Embassy. It was also located across from the Tiergarten, a park with significant acreage, a zoo, and what were said to be some of the loveliest gardens in Europe. Tiergarten translated into English as "The Garden of Beasts." Dodd spent many hours walking there, often in conference with British Ambassador and other officials. He could not know that by the end of the war, the Tiergarten would be reduced to rubble; its handsome trees carted off for firewood, and whatever foliage survived the bombings, either eaten or burnt.

Unbeknownst to Dodd at the time of his arrival, his new home was also within "brick throwing distance" from the headquarters of the SS, and barely removed from the facility codenamed "Aktion (Action) T4," for its address, Tiergartenstrasse 4. In the SS building, people were being imprisoned, tortured and killed. Two blocks away in T4, the Nazis began murdering mentally and physically impaired people, as well as beginning research on methods of mass killing that would end with the introduction of Zyklon-B gas into the concentration camps. T4 was also the place where Fritz Stangl (and many others) learned the skills and mindset that he would put into use as commandant at Treblinka.

Dodd's direct dealings with the Nazis were relatively few and far between. He met with Hitler to formally present his papers, and on a few other occasions. One reason for this was probably that Dodd did not kowtow to the Nazi party line While he was no friend of the Jewish people in the beginning, Dodd came to believe that grievous acts were being perpetrated against the Jews. In the early days of his residency, Dodd suggested to the State Department that fewer Jews be employed in the embassy in Berlin. By the end of his tenure, though, he refused to attend the annual rallies in Nuremberg, kept his face-to-face meetings with the Reich to an absolute minimum, and refused to have Nazis visit in his home. This made him highly unpopular with Hitler and his cronies.

At least for a while, though, another of Dodd's family members was another story entirely. While Mattie and Bill Jr. tended not to make too much of an impression on the scene in Berlin, Dodd's daughter Martha enthusiastically threw herself into the social milieu. She took lovers of every ilk, as long as they were handsome, rich and/or high status. Among her most enduring relationships in Germany were with a Russian NKVD agent Boris Winogradov, Gestapo chief Rudolph Diels, third French secretary Armand Bernard, and Prince Louis Ferdinand, son of Germany's crown prince. For most of her tenure in Germany, Martha saw the Nazis as charming, even after witnessing the malicious persecution by the Storm Troopers of a woman on the streets of Nuremberg, Anna Rath, whose only crime was being affianced to a Jew. As time went on, Diels opened her eyes to much of what was going on: including the fact that the telephones in her family's home were bugged. Although Martha saw herself as a woman of adventure - to the extent of once being set up by Putzi Hanfstaengl to be vetted by Adolph Hitler as a potential girlfriend - eventually even she to decry the actions of the Third Reich.

On the Night of the Long Knives, Martha was out of town on a daytrip with her Russian boyfriend Winogradov. On their approach to Berlin from the countryside, they saw little traffic except for official vehicles. Because Boris's car bore diplomatic license plates, they were allowed to pass into the city. Just down from the Dodd residence, they saw that the SS headquarters had been cordoned off and surrounded with armed men. Only after that night did she allow herself to completely turn against the Nazis. While Martha may have been beautiful and alluring, one cannot help but think her incredibly naive and more than a little stupidly headstrong, even if she had been lovers with Carl Sandburg, and Thornton Wilder was among her most frequent correspondents.

It is impossible to give more a small taste, an amuse bouche, to such a stupendous story as this. For people who read this book, do not neglect to read the footnotes. There, Larson includes vignettes which were too illuminating to ignore, yet did not fit into the corpus of the book itself. Readers of the footnotes will find a small treasure at the end. The last page contains a quote from Christopher Isherwood in Down There on a Visit:

I walked across the snowy plain of the Tiergarten - a smashed statue here, a newly planted sapling there; the Brandenburger Tor, with its red flag flapping against the blue winter sky; and on the horizon, the great ribs of a gutted railway station, like the skeleton of a whale. In the morning light it was all as raw and frank as the voice of history which tells you not to fool yourself; this can happen to any city, to anyone, to you.

"...to you." Lest we forget.