Erik Larson. In the Garden of Beasts.
New York: Crown Publishing Company, 2011.
As reviewed by Ted Odenwald
FDR’s choice of William E. Dodd as ambassador to Germany in 1933 was odd at best.
Dodd simply did not fit the “mold” required for the august position: he was not rich; he had no political leanings; his views of Germany were romanticized because of his wonderful graduate school experience at the University of Leipzig; he was a “mere” college professor, not a career diplomat. His appointment and subsequent service as ambassador drew criticism from German leadership as well as from the “Pretty Good Club” (good old boys in the US State Department) because of his naïve obsessions with political morality and frugality.
His shortcomings, in hindsight, included an ingrained anti-Semitism that emerged in his rationalizations for the US’s failure to open immigration to Europe’s threatened Jews and in his toleration of the growing number of anti-Jewish laws that were being imposed in Germany. In terms of his effectiveness in deterring Hitler’s rise to absolute power, Dodd would probably be judged a failure.
Erik Larson’s primary focus is upon Dodd’s growing realization of what was taking place in Germany during the first year of his ambassadorship in Berlin, the time which “…coincided with Hitler’s ascent from chancellor to absolute tyrant….” It was a time which served as “a prologue in which all the themes of the greater epic of war and murder soon to come were laid down.”
Upon arriving in Berlin, Dodd sensed a threatening atmosphere: there was certainly more tension than he had remembered from his student days, and there were a number of violent acts committed by the SA (the brown shirts) directed against individuals who failed to accede to the campaign of “coordination” or “unity of thought.” “Beneath the surface,…Germany had undergone a rapid and sweeping revolution that reached deep into the fabric of daily life. It had occurred quietly and largely out of view.” Most foreign visitors, caught up in Berlin’s lively atmosphere, failed to observe the wave of violence.
But when several Americans, including newscaster H.V. Kaltenborn, were harassed and/or beaten by storm troopers, and when anti-Jewish laws were passed, clearly removing their rights as citizens, Dodd realized that he was dealing with an unprecedented takeover that would threaten all of Europe.
As a historian, Dodd expected that Hitler’s regime could not last because Germans would rebel against its excesses and overthrow the Nazi’s minority party. He was shocked by the “irrationality of the world in which he now found himself. To some extent he was a prisoner of his own training. As a historian,…[he viewed] the world as the product of historical forces and the decisions of rational people. But Hitler’s government was neither civil nor coherent, and the nation lurched from one inexplicable moment to another.”
Dodd tried to warn his fellow diplomats of the “danger of arbitrary and minority government” in a speech which cautioned that “no system which implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way but collapse. To fail to learn from such ‘blunders of the past’ …was to end up on a course toward ‘another war and chaos.’” His speech outraged the Nazis—and annoyed the isolationist US State Department. But his warnings went unheeded, as he became the American Cassandra; his perceptions were affirmed in the horrific “Night of Long Knives,” in which Hitler’s people purged hundreds of opponents, including some military leaders and officials in Ernst Rohm’s SA. In despair, Dodd lamented that at a time when hundreds were executed “…without trial or any sort of evidence of guilt, and when the population literally trembles with fear, animals have rights guaranteed which men and women cannot think of expecting…One might easily wish to be a horse.”
Martha Dodd, the ambassador’s 24-year-old daughter, is the second focal figure in the book. A free spirit with a laundry list of lovers, she was enraptured with the lifestyle which she found in Berlin. Her lovers included Rudolf Diels, the head of the Gestapo—her “Prince of Darkness.” She also had relations with Hitler’s confidant, Ernst Hanfstaengle, Prince Louis Ferdinand (the son of Germany’s crown prince), United Press correspondent Webb Miller, novelist Thomas Wolfe, biophysicist and future Nobel Prize winner Max Delbruck, and Boris Winogradov, a Russian diplomat, who was actually an agent for NKVD (the early form of the KGB).
Moving from party to party in Berlin’s wild night life, Martha actually sympathized at first with the Nazi movement, viewing their obvious excesses as temporary outpourings of their revolutionary enthusiasm. But she changed her feelings as she saw the obvious fear in her lover, Diels, who knew that he was targeted by his rival Heinrich Himmler; as she witnessed the zealotry of “friends” who claimed that her playing of a recording of a Nazi party song was a sacrilege; and as she witnessed the growing numbers of incidents of savagery. Ever naïve, she eventually volunteered to assist the Russians by operating as a spy.
Much of the action of this book takes place in and around the ambassador’s residence, located at 27A Tiergarten, facing Berlin’s beautiful “Central Park.” “Tiergarten” means “garden of beasts,” but clearly Dodd found that there was nothing pastoral about Germany’s garden—this was a Darwinian nightmare-in-the-making. Diels, who actually dreaded the extent to which his fanatical leaders would go, saw the recent events as “the hour of lightning…announcing a thunderstorm; the violence of which would tear down the rotten dams of the European systems and would put the entire world into flames.”
In their 4 ½ years in Berlin, William and Martha witnessed the realization of Diels’ fears; but they were not totally surprised, as their first year in Germany had gradually unfolded the truth: the journey to a cataclysmic war was mapped out and unavoidable.
Ted Odenwald and his wife, Shirley have lived in Oakland for 40 years. He taught HS English at Glen Rock High School for all of those years plus one more. Now he is enjoying time spent with his family, singing in the North Jersey Chorus and quenching his wanderlust. Ted is also the Worship Leader at the Ramapo Valley Baptist Church in Oakland.