In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

When our book club needed and "Narrative non-fiction" book, I immediately thought of Erik Larson. I've read his "The Devil in the White City" and "Dead Wake" and found both fascinating. So I suggested, In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, and it was chosen.

After reading the first few pages, I realized that I has already read this book. That doesn't mean, however, that I remember it! But apparently I never blogged about it. An oversight on my part, about to be rectified.

This book chronicles the four-year ambassadorship of William Dodd to Hitler's Germany from 1933-1937. 

Dodd was an unlikely candidate chosen after all the obvious choices turned down the assignment. He was a history professor at the University of Chicago and not a wealthy child of elites. For his ordinariness, he was hated by those with whom he served. 

And yet, as Hitler consolidated power in Berlin, few elites around the world recognized the unique threat posed by his Nazi party. Dodd, who did all he could to wake the world to the threat and communicate his objections to Nazi rule, was usually ignored. It's incredible that an American, living "in the garden of beasts," with a front-row view of all that was happening could be systematically ignored and belittled. While Roosevelt seemed to believe Dodd, his hands appeared to be tied by a country and a bureaucracy willfully blind. 

The book seems to be the story of a possible missed opportunity while acknowledging that there was probably nothing to be done. Hitler's rise was inexorable given the world's desire to look away. No one, and certainly not a Cassandra-like, disrespected bureaucrat could convince the world to pay attention. 

While Dodd is the focus of the book, his adult daughter, Martha, takes up a lot of space as well. A pseudo-intellectual and self-described radical, she (literally) flirts with the Nazi regime. It took over a year for the bloom to come off that rose, even when confronted with the horrors of the government first-hand. Her promiscuity put her in bed (again literally) with some of the most powerful people in Berlin at that time. Both the Nazis and the Soviets tried to make an asset of her. In her left-wing naïveté she believed she could work effectively at... it's not clear. She loved being in the room with powerful people, but she left wreckage in her wake. Several deaths can be almost directly attributed to her presence in the victim's lives. She ended up exiled from America for communist activities. It took actually living in a communist country for her to disavow that particular affection. 

I think the biggest theme of the book is willful blindness and naïveté, both on the part of the world at large and in Martha in particular. Knowing the ending, it's particularly frustrating to read again and again of the obstacles placed in Dodd's path as he tried to warn the world of the coming war. Could he have stopped it? Obviously not. But it's tantalizing to imagine the, "What if...?"