In the Garden of Beasts Conflict between Germany, the US, and the Jewish Question

This is a spectacular book about the American ambassador to Germany in the run-up to World War II. There is love, scandal, espionage, and more in the pages. As part of my MFA work, I read this book and it is really cool and worth reading.

The Garden of Beasts catalogs the adventures of the Dodd family as William Dodd takes over the US Ambassadorship in Berlin. The book is a sort of non-fiction novel, but there is a central conflict between Ambassador William Dodd and the politics of the time. 

The central conflict of the story is a geopolitical one with an ethnic flair. Dodd is tasked with representing American interests in Hitler’s Germany, and he is immediately thrown into a conflict between American Jews who want the US government to condemn the early stages of Hitler’s persecution of Jews and raging anti-Semitism within the American government that was preventing Roosevelt from making the kind of statements that American Jews wanted. 

The condition of Jews and others becomes a problem that Dodd can never escape. This story is intriguing even though the reader already knows how this story will end: the death of 6 million Jews. However, in 1933, the average German does not care about people getting carted off or violence against Jews. Many Americans consider it only to be a domestic problem and certainly nothing the isolationist United States should get involved in. Dodd wants more interaction in global affairs by the US. Dodd is disturbed by any appearance that he is in Germany “to help the Jews grievances” and has to dispel any idea that he was there to do that. The consistent laws passed by the Nazi regime throughout the book would keep this conflict front and center. Much like how the world was indifferent to the Holocaust, Dodd was caught on the ground due to that indifference. He is constantly beset by the “Jewish problem” and the anemic American response. 

Larson also does a remarkable job of creating the world of Berlin in 1933, and while the reader knows how the story ends, he does a good job of demonstrating how many people at the time did not see the coming horrors of mass death coming. He also does a good job of creating the sort of grey “world war II is coming” doom cloud while also demonstrating that few people really anticipated the coming conflict, and most did not take Hitler seriously. A lesson for our own time as well. This is a sort of pallor that hangs over the whole book. The reader knows what’s coming and watches an intimate group of characters; the Dodd family, march right toward the coming doom. It’s a meta-conflict that is incredibly compelling. 

There are also other side conflicts that fill this book and keep the reader turning the pages. One is Dodd’s daughter Martha. In the course of the book, she sleeps with multiple men, divorces her husband, and briefly becomes an ineffectual Soviet spy who ends up marrying a local and staying in Europe after Dodd’s departure as Ambassador in 1937. 

There is also a conflict of perceptions. The Dodd family thinks that Berlin isn’t so bad on their arrival, and they think that Hitler, only in power for six months in 1933, wasn’t so bad. However, this idea is quickly dispelled. By the end of the book, Dodd became an outspoken critic of the Nazi regime and spoke out on the horrors of what Hitler was really up to. 

Yet another conflict of the story is the matter of money. There is less about this in the book, but the New York bankers wanted Dodd to make sure that Germany would repay the bonds they had purchased despite the Nazi regime defaulting on the debt (eventually). There is also the matter of Dodd’s lifestyle. Most ambassadors came from money, and Dodd being an academic, was living on his modest salary of $17,000 a year and was not prone to hosting the lavish parties that were usually held by people in a high position in Berlin. He also chose to bring his Chevy with him and chose to drive about in it regularly. He also walked often and pretty much flew in the face of most diplomatic protocol, which set him at odds with the existing embassy staff. He also chose to live in a modest house that was not “fit for an Ambassador.” 

As an element of craft, Erik Larson handles all these conflicts in a way the reader can keep track of them. The way these conflicts are woven together through a myriad of meetings, drinks in bars, official dinners, and other events are done in a way that creates the world of Berlin but shows the reader the difficult position Dodd found himself in. This is ironic considering he wanted a simple job with few duties so he would have time to write his complete history of the Old South. Instead, he found himself right in the middle of the major geopolitical conflict of his day. All of these conflicts clap together on the page, but Larson manages all of them with aplomb.