In the Garden of Beasts

The subtitle of Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts (#145) says it all: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin.  The family in this case is that of William E. Dodd, appointed Ambassador to Berlin by Roosevelt in 1933, where he served until the end of 1937.  His wife Mattie and their two grown children, Bill Jr., and Martha, accompanied him, but the focus of the book is on Dodd himself and daughter Martha.

Dodd became an ambassador by accident because none of the wealthy elite who comprised the US diplomatic corps wanted the job.  He had been head of the History Department at the University of Chicago and was contemplating stepping down so that he could finally finish writing his life's work: Old South.  He would have like nothing better than to retire to his farm in Virginia to do so.  Instead, his name was mentioned by a friend of his with Washington connections as a possible candidate for a diplomatic post and he was summoned to an interview with Roosevelt.  Dodd accepted the post provided that it was understood that he would live on his diplomatic salary.  Before long, Dodd and his family were in Berlin where Hitler had recently been appointed Vice Chancellor and the Nazi party was on the rise. 

Dodd was uneasy in Berlin from the beginning.  It was not the Germany he remembered from his student days in Leipzig.  He watched the new laws being enacted by Hitler with a growing sense of dismay and did his best to counteract harassment of American citizens.  All this without the support of the State Department at home or the Berlin Embassy, or for that matter, the rest of the diplomatic community.

Dodd's contact with the high-ranking government officials was part and parcel of his job, but Martha's involvement with the power elite was of an entirely different and personal nature.  She mingled with the international correspondents, the writers, the young men of the diplomatic legations, but most importantly, with the rising stars of the Nazis.  She was infatuated with the "New Germany".  Her affairs did not go unnoticed or unremarked by the other American Embassy officials, most of whom grew to actively dislike her.   Her letters and journals do provide a glimpse into a social whirl entirely separate from the one her father experienced.

How William and Martha Dodd's attitudes towards the German government and people were shaped and changed by their first hand observations and experiences as events around them unfolded is a fascinating read.  By the end of the book, I found much to admire about Dodd's prescience and doomed attempts to sound the alarm.  Martha, on the other hand, was quite a piece of work!  This book can be painful to read on many levels, but the window it opens on this period of history is illuminating.