In the Garden of Beasts

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Have you heard of William Dodd? I didn’t think so. I hadn’t either before I read Eric Larson’s new book, In the Garden of Beasts. Two of Larson’s previous books, The Devil in the White City about the Columbia Exhibition in Chicago in 1892-93, and Isaac’s Storm, about the 1901 Galveston hurricane, are among my favorites. So I approached this one hopefully.

The book meets and exceeds all expectations (as they say in government documents.) Franklin Roosevelt sent William Dodd to Berlin as the US ambassador to Germany in 1933. Dodd had been teaching at the University of Chicago and had not a whit of experience in foreign affairs. The folks in the state department didn’t like him one bit; after he had been there a while they liked him even less and worked behind his back to get him ousted. Roosevelt held on, recognizing that what Dodd did have was a backbone of steel and enough intellectual flexibility to recognize over time the danger the Nazis posed not just to the Jews, Germany, and Europe, but to the entire world.

Woven into the flow of the story is Dodd’s daughter Martha’s high life, including affairs with the head of the Gestapo and later with a Russian spy. The book reads like a thriller with a climax that made The Night of the Long Knives very real to me for the first time. The Garden of Beasts, by the way, is a loose translation of The Tiergarten, the park near which the Dodds lived in Berlin.

There is a review of the book here in tomorrow's NY Times. My friend, Robin, has interviewed Larson and the resulting piece for Real Change is excellent and entertaining. (Except for his equating the Tea Party with Hitler. What was he thinking, especially after having read this book?)

2011 No 85  Coming soon: Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford

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