In the Garden of Beasts, Erik Larson (4)
Erik Larson writes very readable non-fiction. He has done it again with this telling of the lives of the American Ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, and his daughter, Martha, through 1932-1937. As you likely know, these years were the incubation stage of Hitler’s agenda and power. It is very interesting to follow events unfold through the eyes of ‘foreigners’ living in the capital. While they begin trying to be positive and support the isolationist behavior of many Americans (including Roosevelt and his secretary of state who was far more worried about Germany paying debts than the social situation), they could not ignore many of the telling signs of the erosion of rights and privileges of every German. One of the biggest surprises to me was that Hitler was not the top power in Germany during this time. He was Chancellor, but Hindenburg was the President and controlled the regular army (the Reichswehr). There was also Ernst Rohm, who ran the SA (the SS were an elite group within the SA and the Gestapo were also separate). Hitler was very powerful by 1932, but he still was not all-powerful until Hindenburg died in 1934. As many books (fiction and non-fiction) I’ve read about the war, I found it interesting to read about the time prior, particularly from an outsider’s view. We always strive to learn from history in order not to repeat such horrible events. WWII and the actions of the Nazis are some of the hardest to understand. I don’t know if the lessons and signs as illustrated in this book are clear enough to avoid, if anything it was rather scary to read how subtle they were to many people.
Erik Larson's ambitious "In the Garden of Beasts" provides a snapshot of Berlin during the years 1933-34. The author focuses on two Americans, sixty-four year old William Dodd, who was far from Roosevelt's first choice to be America's ambassador to Berlin, and his beautiful and promiscuous daughter, Martha, twenty-four. William and Martha witnessed Adolf Hitler's "ascent from chancellor to absolute tyrant, when everything hung in the balance and nothing was certain." Increasingly, "the country had undergone a brutal spasm of state condoned violence." Books by Freud, Einstein, and Mann, among others, were burned in great pyres. Larson's thesis is that if certain leaders had not been naïve, cowardly, and/or slow to react, "the course of history could so easily have been changed." Why did Roosevelt and others stand by while thugs seized control of Germany, persecuted Jews and other citizens, and prepared to wage all out war? In his prologue, Larson states that "these were complicated people moving through a complicated time, before the monsters declared their true nature."
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