Book: In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

William E. Dodd was offered the position of ambassador to Germany by President Franklin Roosevelt (after several others declined as Dodd learned later, tempering his pride somewhat). In 1933, he travels by ship across the Atlantic to Berlin with his wife and two grown children, Bill and Martha. He becomes a disillusioned, sad and frustrated man as he witnesses the changes happening to a Germany he loved and remembered fondly from his student days in Leipzig years before.

Martha Dodd was a very modern woman, flirtatious, intelligent, not overly concerned with propriety, and Larsen had the benefit of her many written observations during their stay in Germany.

What fascinated me was how reluctant the United States was to believe and censor Germany as Hitler began his rise to power as chancellor and then became the supreme leader after the death of President Hindenburg. It is a strange and barely comprehensible story even to this day. Dodd was eventually forced to quit his post, a bit earlier than he would have left Germany anyway. His predictions of Hitler's evil intentions vindicated him later in life, but he was never accorded his due as ambassador since a few high-ranking officials in the US government just did not like this quiet, unassuming man, a man who wanted to live within his means and not fritter time and money, a man who kept trying to alert the US to the reality of what was happening in Germany. Dodd thought for awhile that the common sense of the German people would surely prevail and Hitler would be ousted but, when that did not happen, he felt powerless to effect change and was revolted by what was becoming more and more obvious to him.

Slowly and inexorably Hitler and his henchmen moved to the status of monsters, appealing to German pride and nationalism, but also exploiting the darker urges and unexpressed thoughts of the German people.

The Dodd family at first was inclined to not meddle in Germany's internal affairs. This was the prevailing reason (along with a pervasive anti-Semitism) that many in the US offered when they looked the other way. And times were different without today's instant communication from nearly any spot in the world, so events were likely diluted and diminished by the passage of time. What is immediate today would be month-old news 80 years ago.

The book is not a history of those times; it merely glances at them through one American family, albeit a high-profile family, whose members and acquaintances documented their experiences in the cafes, restaurants, salons and streets of Berlin in the mid 1930s.

Can most of us ever understand anything about the rise of Nazism and Hitler? Not if we don't make an attempt. Reading this book, I learned a a bit about the years leading up to WWII. I was wandering through the library stacks at Herrick the other morning and happened on a book titled My Wounded Heart or The Story of a Jewish Mother and Her Children in Hitler's Germany. There is black and white photo on the cover...of a family: a mother and father and four children. These specific memoirs often can make history more vivid, more real, more terrible or heroic or mundane, than any "history" book.

Larsen's book also has a subtitle: Love, Terror and and American Family in Hitler's Berlin.