In the Garden of Beasts
love, terror, and an American family in Hitler's Berlin
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4.2 • 14 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Berlin, 1933. William E. Dodd, a mild-mannered academic from Chicago, becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Germany, where he is about to witness a turning point in history.
Dodd and his family observe firsthand the many changes — some subtle, some disturbing, and some horrifically violent — that signal Hitler’s consolidation of power. The ambassador has little choice but to associate with key figures in the Nazi party, and his increasingly concerned cables make little impact on an indifferent US State Department. Meanwhile, his daughter, Martha, is drawn to the young men of the Third Reich and their vision of a ‘New Germany’, and has a succession of affairs with senior party players, including the first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels.
As the year darkens, the Dodds find their lives transformed, and any last illusions they might have about Hitler are shattered. Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the times, and with brilliant portraits of Hitler, Goebbels, Göring, Himmler, and others, Erik Larson’s extraordinary book sheds unique light on events as they unfold, resulting in an unforgettable, addictively readable work of narrative history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this mesmerizing portrait of the Nazi capital, Larson plumbs a far more diabolical urban cauldron than in his bestselling The Devil in the White City. He surveys Berlin, circa 1933 1934, from the perspective of two American na fs: Roosevelt's ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, an academic historian and Jeffersonian liberal who hoped Nazism would de-fang itself (he urged Hitler to adopt America's milder conventions of anti-Jewish discrimination), and Dodd's daughter Martha, a sexual free spirit who loved Nazism's vigor and ebullience. At first dazzled by the glamorous world of the Nazi ruling elite, they soon started noticing signs of its true nature: the beatings meted out to Americans who failed to salute passing storm troopers; the oppressive surveillance; the incessant propaganda; the intimidation and persecution of friends; the fanaticism lurking beneath the surface charm of its officialdom. Although the narrative sometimes bogs down in Dodd's wranglings with the State Department and Martha's soap opera, Larson offers a vivid, atmospheric panorama of the Third Reich and its leaders, including murderous Nazi factional infighting, through the accretion of small crimes and petty thuggery. Photos.
