Recently Read

In The Garden Of Beasts

In The Garden Of Beasts
by Erik Larson

At this point, we have long since passed the point when a standard, comprehensive history of Nazi Germany has much left to teach us. That ground has been long since thoroughly covered.

Hence, author Erik Larson made a canny decision to narrow his focus to a particular place and time (the diplomatic community in Berlin in 1933-34), and a particular pair of persons--Ambassador William Dodd and his twenty-something daughter Martha, during their first year in the Nazi capital--to show us new landmarks in that most familiar territory. The result is the highly illuminating monograph In The Garden Of Beasts. 

Between the two principal characters, Ambassador Dodd far and away comes across as the better person. Dodd had his faults; benign faults, such as excessive zeal for maintaining his common-man manner despite his lofty position as ambassador to a major European nation; and not-so-benign faults, such as his willingness to soft-pedal America's relations with the Nazi regime, despite his foreknowledge about the excesses and outright crimes of Hitler, his subordinates, and the Nazis' strong-arm tools such as the thuggish SA. Dodd greatly admired the German people, an admiration born in his days as a student in Leipzig; that feeling fed his sense that Hitler could be reasoned with, could be taken at his word (as with the Führer's oft-repeated but risible professions of peaceful intentions) until the dishonesty, the almost inhuman irrationality of the Nazi leadership finally brought his perspective to what is now the historical truth.

(The title of the book is a pun on the Tiergarten--the garden of beasts--which was the Berlin neighborhood where the diplomatic community live and worked. The irrational Nazi leaders, such as the sociopathic Göring, fit the image only too well.)

Unfortunately, Martha Dodd never quite made the transition her father did. The younger Dodd, a would-be writer whose literary talents seemed to lean more towards hobnobbing with writers rather than producing actual editable copy, displays a cornucopia of faults throughout Larson's narrative. Between an all-too enthusiastic embrace of the Nazi "revolution" (including turning a blind eye to its harrowing realities, even after her own eyewitness experiences), scandalizing the city with various affairs with various officials from various nations--including at least one go-round with Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels--and letting one particular dalliance set her on flirtatious course towards a potential career as Communist spy, Martha dances through the text as a frustrating, indeed irritating, presence. Taken as a whole, Martha's career in Germany and beyond testifies that she was--to put it in the most brutal terms--a shallow, self-absorbed slut. The reader affords her little sympathy upon learning that her actions ultimately led to a life of disappointment and exile.

One wonders, then, if Larson picked the best eyewitnesses to serve as the prism through which the reader might see a contemporary portrait of Nazi Germany. Thankfully, the author is a gifted prose stylist whose talent brings to vivid life the scenes of that strange time, and he punctuates his story of monsters and madness with plenty of dark humor and keen insight. That the Nazi leadership themselves were fascinating characters--as evil beings often are--helps a great deal to hold the reader's interest. And the heroic denouement of Ambassador Dodd's career--his eventual firm stance against the Nazis, including at least one brave public speech in Berlin, as well as numerous engagements after his return home, warning his countrymen against the developing threat in Europe--gives the story a redemptive and satisfying climax.

Even if one grows tired of Martha and her antics, In The Garden Of Beasts is itself never tiresome. It's a good read, a book that--through its intimate stance with its subject--helps the reader see the broader, well-known picture with fresh vision. For anyone whose interest in those dark days has not yet been satiated, In The Garden Of Beasts is worth a look.