2012 Book Log #6: In the Garden of Beasts  by Erik Larson


Larson is best known for his books that contrast technological marvels with criminal events that happened concurrently (Devil in the White City, for example), but this book harkens back to Isaac's Storm, the story of a man who had his beliefs changed due to a seminal event (in this case, a deadly hurricane that more or less destroyed Galveston, Texas).

This book moves on to a bigger stage, as it covers the tenure of US ambassador to Germany William Dodd, a history professor who winds up being the first American ambassador to Nazi Germany. He takes the job believing that he can use the power of his intellect (and the US government) to help steer Hitler and his friends into less radical waters. As his time in office unfolds, he has to battle both the Germans - who continue to act out, occasionally beating an American citizen who didn't stop to salute marching SA members - and internal enemies in the State Department, who seemed to spend as much time deriding Dodd for his lack of Ivy League credentials and frugal way as they did working on actual diplomacy.

Dodd's daughter is a sort of co-main character, a vivacious young woman whose own intellect and writing gets her into literary and higher society. She's also a bit of a romantic adventurer, between her marriage to a much older New York banker and the on-again, off-again romance she kindled in Berlin with a Russian intelligence agent who was working to turn her into an informant (a task of which she was apparently unaware).

I don't know if I really enjoyed the book as much as his others, but I did find it fascinating to see how the common if often casual anti-Semitism among American diplomats (including Dodd) and the common belief that the Nazis would moderate or be replaced led to a number of missed opportunities. I don't think another ambassador could have done more to push the Nazis to a more moderate position - Dodd did as well as he could, I think, and anyone trying to do more would likely have put US-German relations in a more difficult position - and I don't think anyone would have really succeeded in doing anything to make things better. Anyone and everyone could have done more to get Jews out of Germany while the getting was good.

All that being said, I do think the strength of the book is the inside look into the early days of the Nazi regime, and it's well worth a read for that alone.