For Book #3, it seemed time to go with a nonfiction selection, and it’s hard to do much better than In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson. I was a latecomer to Larson’s work, but he has become one of my favorite authors, and I’ve almost finished all of his works — and have yet to be disappointed.
I can tell you a lot about Larson’s work by telling you that when I go to book sales — which is often — I usually find his stuff mistakenly placed in the fiction section. Honestly, I thought he was a novelist at first. This is an easy mistake to make because the writing and storytelling is so good, you might get lost in what you think is a novel. And yet, there is always a ton of research in everything he does, but it’s passed along in an easy way to digest.
This book follows the appointment of the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, who was served as Adolf Hitler came to power in the early 1930s. While stories about what Hitler was doing to Jews and other groups were starting to filter back to America, many State Department officials were reluctant to believe what was going on. At the time of his appointment, Dodd was head of the history department at the University of Chicago, and he was somewhat skeptical himself and hoped Hitler would in time moderate his inflammatory words.
One thing that’s great about Larson’s work is that he lets the reader come to understand that the things in history we might consider foregone conclusions often were not in real time as they happened. It’s not hard to put together that there was clearly some anti-semitism and doubt of Jewish claims at the time that made the world slow to react.
Dodd figured things out pretty fast, and that storyline itself is fascinating. He ended up making a lot of enemies in the State Department as he reported events. President Franklin Roosevelt eventually listened and appreciated his work, while several of Dodd’s superiors plotted on ways to get him recalled because in addition to being somewhat slow-witted, they doubted his qualifications as he sounded the alarm.
While there are several intriguing things to follow, Dodd’s daughter Martha adds some spice to the story. An attractive woman in the middle of a divorce, Martha got caught up in the Berlin social scene when she arrived and had affairs with Nazi officials, secret agents, and others. There is plenty to read out there about Dodd’s later career as a Soviet spy, although she was never convicted of espionage.
There is a lot to learn in all the stories spun within In the Garden of Beasts, but even readers who have read volumes on World War II or Hitler’s rise to power will find some things they likely didn’t know or didn’t have the entire story.
Along with The Splendid and the Vile, about Winston Churchill’s first year in power, this is one of Larson’s best works, and that’s saying a lot. This won’t be the last Larson book in these reviews, rest assured.
Questions for discussion below or on Facebook: Why do you think so many people were slow to catch onto the evil of Adolph Hitler? There are still Holocaust deniers. What do you think creates that? Are there world events happening today that most people are “missing”?
Writing Prompt: Start a nonfiction or fiction story, or a poem about a conversation you overheard in public in the last week.