‘… In the morning light it was all as raw and frank as the voice of history which tells you not to fool yourself; this can happen to any city, to anyone, to you.’
~ Christopher Isherwood, Down There on a Visit (published 1962), of post-WWII Berlin
Isherwood’s words are eerie to read in August 2011, 66 years after Adolf Hitler’s frenzy for world domination was finally quashed. We live in a time that parallels the early 1930s, when Hitler was gathering his poisonous momentum: Widespread drought on several continents; uncontrolled spending, greed and debt; mass surveillance of citizens and suppression of dissenting civilian gatherings and opinions; political, religious and ethnic fanaticism; people of questionable sanity vying for governing power; citizens enraged, exhausted, and increasingly desperate.
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in HItler’s Berlin is a meticulous, horrifying and instructive portrayal of Nazi Germany during the years 1933-1937, when William E. Dodd served as the United States Ambassador to Germany and Adolf Hitler was beginning to hammer his absolute dominion into place. Dodd was not President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first ambassadorial choice; as a scholarly, diffident, frugal and deeply moral man, Dodd was largely judged inept and a weakling by his governmental peers. Roosevelt himself, while harbouring forebodings about Hitler’s intentions and actions (attacks by the thuggish SA on American citizens — Jewish or not — were already occurring by 1933), erred disastrously on the side of maintaining the diplomatic status quo; the overriding concern behind the American government’s choice to largely ignore Dodd’s (and others’) warnings about Hitler’s surreptitious, ceaseless amassing of military force was ‘the outstanding German debt to American creditors.’ Even as a malicious and ignorant tide of public opinion turned to blame ‘the greedy Jew’ for collapsing economies in Europe and America, capitalist concerns came first.
So it was in William Dodd’s eyes, as he began to see through the pomp and bluster of both Nazi and diplomatic culture. Even before Dodd and his family arrived in Berlin in July 1933, the ‘savage darkening’ of Germany was in gear; even then, in the words of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise (a U.S. citizen), ‘the frontiers of civilization [had] been crossed.’ Dodd arrived in Berlin after rounds of meetings stateside with bank executives who wanted German debts paid, dialogues with already petrified Jewish leaders, and consults with political and military leaders who largely counselled him to ‘ameliorate Jewish sufferings’ while also ensuring that ‘Jews not be allowed to dominate economic or intellectual life in Berlin as they have done for a long time.’ One wealthy philanthropist suggested to Dodd that the Jews of Germany were at least partially responsible for the hatred gaining against them, believing (along with Dodd, who initially, briefly, and to a much lesser degree held this view) that ‘the Jews had held a great many more of the key positions in Germany than their numbers or their talents entitled them to.’ The man’s parting words to Dodd: ‘Let Hitler have his way.’
Already, Hitler was. Citizens were beginning to turn against their relatives, friends, neighbours and colleagues, denouncing them to the newly formed Gestapo, whose malevolent influence demanded the turn: ‘One study of Nazi records found that of a sample of 213 denunciations, 37 percent arose not from heartfelt political belief but from private conflicts, with the trigger often breathtakingly trivial.’ One store clerk accused a customer, who was rightfully demanding change from a purchase, of tax evasion. Ordinary or imagined shortcomings could denounce one to torture or execution by gunshot. Laws that stripped Jewish citizens of all civil rights and means of survival were drawn up and brutally enforced; at first, these laws infiltrated daily life with enough subtlety (and occasional, maddening temporary reprieves) that some Jews convinced themselves that the sadism would pass.
Most diplomats were still living it up in Berlin alongside Nazis of elite status, cracking macabre, callous jokes, wink-winking one another, sloshing back champagne and denial. (I reflected, after finishing the book, that humans do have a superpower: our consummate ability and willingness to deny reality.) Journalists and newspaper correspondents were beginning to fear for their lives, some leaving Germany under duress or by foreboding choice. One celebrated American correspondent, Edgar A. Mowrer, got off a parting shot as he was put on a train in late summer 1933 by a Nazi official who asked him ‘in a wheedling voice, ‘And when are you coming back to Germany, Herr Mower?’
‘With cinematic flair, Mowrer answered, ‘Why, when I can come back with about two million of my countrymen.” Mowrer’s wife grieved for the country and people she had come to love: ‘Looking back on it all is like seeing someone you love go mad — ‘
It took fewer than three months for William Dodd’s illusions to fall away; during one of the seeming ebbs in Nazi madness, Dodd gave a speech whose audience included Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Josef Goebbels. Dodd’s closing words are eerily presentient in retrospect: ‘… no system which implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended in any way other than collapse.’ Despite the applause Dodd received for his speech, in large part crafted to emphasize economic responsibility and examples of disasters past, he already thought that the ‘people around Hitler’ were a ‘whole gang … of criminals and cowards’, and his mounting fears were largely batted away as irritants by everyone from the Roosevelt on down. Dodd, disgusted by the diplomatic practice of ‘playing the liar on bended knee’, wanted to ‘awaken Germany to the dangers of its current path.’ The idolatry of Hitler had already reached a point where even cough candies were embossed with a swastika.
Hitler, as we know, continued his rampage unabated. Ordinary citizens became afraid to stay in communal ski lodges — what if they spoke in their sleep and a denouncer heard them? People sometimes began conversations amongst friends with quips like ‘Lebst du noch?’, which colloquially meant, ‘So you’re still alive, eh?’ Writer Thomas Wolfe, after being in Germany, wrote of ‘… an entire nation … infested with [a] creeping paralysis which twisted and blighted all human relations.’ Even faraway citizens of other countries were being hounded for proof of non-Jewish heritage: J.R.R. Tolkien, in England, was asked about his ancestry before The Hobbit could be published in Germany (his response, in part: ‘… I can only reply that I regret that I … have no ancestors of that gifted people’).
The Nazi demand to know whether Tolkien’s ancestry was at all Jewish was part of the Party’s campaign to ‘sterilize’ German culture and arts of all influences of, and creations by, any artist (German or otherwise) whose work did not fit the Nazi ideal — especially any art that had ‘the Jewish stain.’ The few professional artists (of all kinds) who chose to stay in Germany between 1933 and 1945 toed the Party line to survive; shortly after the war, a visceral, Nazi-damning and realist (as in, ‘I was there, and this is what it was like’) stream of art and literature poured out of German citizens who, even though Aryan, had been under constant surveillance and threat. Hans Fallada was one of them; his novel No Man Dies Alone (written in a 24-day torrent in 1947, shortly before Fallada died) is a testament to how ordinary German citizens stayed alive and sane. No one was safe except people who were fanatically loyal to Hitler … and even they were subject to his delusions of plots being hatched against him. Fallada, who met Dodd and his family, wrote to his mother in 1934: ‘I cannot act as I want to — if I want to stay alive.’ Dodd’s daughter, Martha, wrote in her 1939 memoir (In Embassy Eyes, composed after the family’s return to America) that she saw in Fallada ‘the stamp of naked fear on a writer’s face for the first time.’
William Dodd, as a professional scholar of history, knew what was coming; during his four-year tenure as ambassador, he did influence a few Nazis into daring to think and speak beyond the fanatical devotion they were ordered to exhibit. Hitler’s vice-chancellor, Franz von Papen, managed to deliver one speech that had been crafted by his speechwriter and his secretary, who were both desperate to reveal the truth; they kept the speech from Papen until right before he delivered it at the university in Marburg. He gave it in a state of terror; ‘the remarks that followed,’ writes Larson, ‘would have earned any man of lesser stature a trip to the gallows’ — the audience was dotted with ‘men wearing brown shirts and swastika armbands.’ Even so, Papen’s speech brought on thunderous acclaim from the audience — people yearning for humane and lucid leadership. The speech’s coda included a citizens’ proclamation of loyalty to Hitler, ‘provided [we] are allowed to have a share in the making and carrying out of decisions, provided every word of criticism is not immediately interpreted as malicious, and provided that despairing patriots are not branded as traitors.’
It is that last line — provided that despairing patriots are not branded as traitors, that rivets me back to the present. How many people in how many nations fear, right now, that their genuine love for their home country may be used against them and deranged by others into accusations of treason? Victor Klemperer, a philologist and writer of Jewish ancestry who survived Nazi rule by escaping Germany in a refugee column that found its way into American-controlled territory during the Dresden bombing, wrote in his memoir, I Will Bear Witness, ‘Everywhere uncertainty, ferment, secrets. We live from day to day.’
As I write these words, I hear military jets roaring again and again through my neighbourhood sky — a summer air show is in progress. I imagine myself in the stands at this air show, being asked by a reveler, ‘How do ya like it?’ My response: ‘It reminds me of war; it gives me no pleasure.’ Too many people the world over hear such a roar and for them, it’s a threat to their lives, their loved ones, their land.
A ‘strange indifference to atrocity’ settled over Germany as Hitler’s power became absolute; William Dodd, who endured two private meetings with the Führer, came to view him with ‘a sense of horror.’ One Nazi officer, who had turned against (and managed to outlive) the regime, returned from a brief self-exile abroad to a people he saw as ‘chloroformed … dazed.’
I can’t help but wonder if we present-day humans, almost en masse, are also thus dazed … exhausted, spent, and seething inside. Nearly shredded of faith in our fellows, and laxing into ‘the delicate work of watching and carefully doing nothing.’ William Dodd fell into this state, and ended up making it a choice, so that he and his family would survive his tenure in Nazi Berlin. By the time the Dodds sailed for America in late 1937, all German voices — but one — had been silenced.
William Dodd took no comeuppance — ‘I told you so!’ wasn’t his way. He and his wife, daughter, and son were radically altered, and the parents’ health quickly ruined, by their four years abroad. Less than a year after returning to the U.S., Dodd’s wife, Mattie, died of heart failure in her sleep; William died of pneumonia in early 1940, and their son, Bill Jr., died of cancer in 1952. Only Martha, the lone daughter, lived to old age — eighty-two years.
Occasional and sometimes begrudging official voices rose up in Dodd’s defence after he died; praise continued to pour from his true friends and loved ones. Thomas Wolfe remembered Dodd’s ambassadorial home in Berlin as a ‘free and fearless harbour for people of all opinions … people who live and walk in terror have been able to draw their breath there without fear … [T]he dry, plain, homely unconcern with which the Ambassador observes all the pomp and glitter and decorations and the tramp of marching men would do your heart good to see.’
We need, now, more of this ‘dry, plain, homely unconcern with … pomp and glitter and the tramp of marching men [and women]’. In this vivid and accurate, many-sourced story of a tragic ambassadorship, Erik Larson gives us not only a spellbinding account of lives under sinister siege, but a moral directive to quietly choose, first with ourselves and then in all our relations and doings, a lucid and moderate way of conducting our thoughts and behaviour.
I’ve never before felt so spooked by a book … never before so urgently asked of a story, ‘Is such a thing happening now, again?’
Read this book, and the question will dog you.
- Goodreads rating – 3.86
- REVIEW – Lexie