right now that’s downright fascinating. So fascinating that I keep getting distracted by wanting to follow clues, comments, breadcrumbs, and more. In short, I’ve gone down the Rabbit Hole of researching bits of information I’m learning and suddenly realize I’ve put the book aside for hours or days. The minute I jump back into the book, I’m off on another tangent!
To me, that’s the sign of a wonderful book, one that gets you thinking, that makes you wonder about the information conveyed by the author and the topic.
In this instance, I’m reading Erik Larson’s “In the Garden of Beasts.” No, it’s not “the garden of the beasts” but garden of beasts, a translation of Tiergarten, the large park in central Berlin that’s similar to Central Park in NYC or Hyde Park in London, where wild beasts once roamed and were hunted, where residents of the city walk, ride, and are seen. According to the author, there was a zoo on the huge park.
Readers learn the name of the park in the very first pages of Larson’s book, a tempting tidbit that sparks curiosity and perhaps a digression, the first of many. After exploring maps of Berlin and researching the name of the park, I realized the title of the book foreshadows the topic and scope of this “novelistic” history which recounts in detail 1933 - 1934 Germany. The title was a pun, for the garden was full of human beasts, Germans who plotted harm for the “undesirables” of the country. Ironically, it was also the perfect place to walk and talk without being overheard.
Nineteen thirty-three and thirty-four are the first years with Hitler as Chancellor.
In 1933, the Nazis take over the county, the world slowly begins to wake up to the horror that is slowly unfolding. In this case, the book chronicles the first year William Dodd, Professor of History at University of Chicago, is the US Ambassador to Germany (under FDR) from August 1933 through December 29, 1937. He’s not particularly well suited to the post and he’s definitely not FDR’s first or even second choice. Naïve and ill-suited and most definitely penny-pinching, Dodd brings his wife, son, and daughter with him to Berlin. Thus begins this detailed history, a history that asks the reader to pay attention to details, to the daily unfolding of Nazi control of Germany and the German people.
Larson’s book is full of names. He drops them with regularity expecting his readers to recognize them. An authorial quirk is to provide an epithet or descriptor for many of the minor characters such as Hans Gisevius (who wrote “To The Bitter End”, who is always identified as the “Gestapo Memoirist”. Larson uses Dodd’s diaries, primary sources, accounts of others in the State Department and European Ambassadors and undersecretaries Dodd associated with. Most fascinating are the people Dodd’s daughter Martha associated with, everyone from members of Hitler’s staff, to SA and SS officers, to possible NKVD spies. Martha had an active social life that wasn’t discrete and put her in contact with many people, many of whom supported the Nazis.
Below is my list so far:
William Shirer Berlin Diary, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and The Nightmare Years.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950 (2000).
Winston Churchill – The Gathering Storm
Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (1935).
Herman Wouk, Winds of War (1971)
