In the Garden of Beasts

Review

Larson’s report on the experiences and actions of the Dodd family in the years during which Hitler rose to power is a depressing thing to read today. It is frankly impossible not to draw straight lines from rhetorical style, evasions, and populist manipulations from Hitler to Trump.

See page 159:

“The Chancellor’s assurances were so satisfying and so unexpected that I think they are on the whole too good to be true,” Messersmith wrote. “We must keep in mind, I believe, that when Hitler says anything he for the moment convinces himself that it is true. He is basically sincere; but he is at the same time a fanatic.”

Emphasis added. Is this not the behavior that we tend to witness from current American leadership?

It is almost too depressing to write about.

The book is very good. The pacing is great, and everything I’ve ever heard of Larson has turned out to be true. I would put this up there with Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Keefe’s Say Nothing as some of the best told non-fiction I’ve read.

Notes

• p19 - Polls showed that 95 percent of Americans wanted the United States to avoid involvement in any foreign war.
• p29 - On the other side stood Jewish groups aligned with the American Jewish Committee, headed by Judge Proskauer, which counseled a quieter path, fearing that noisy protests and boycotts would only make things worse for Jews still in Germany.
• p34 - “I have tried to point out in my dispatches that the higher leaders of the party are growing more moderate, while the intermediary leaders and the masses are just as radical as ever, and that the question is whether the higher leaders will be able to impose their moderate will on the masses,” Messersmith wrote. “It begins to look pretty definitely that they will not be able to do so, but that the pressure from the bottom is becoming stronger all the time.”
• p56 - Nice days were still nice. “The sun shines,” wrote Christopher Isherwood in his Berlin Stories, “and Hitler is the master of this city. The sun shines, and dozens of my friends . . . are in prison, possibly dead.”
• p133-134 - The thing that weighed on [Dodd] most, however, was the irrationality of the world in which he now found himself. To some extent he was a prisoner of his own training. As a historian, he had come to view the world as the product of historical forces and the decisions of more or less rational people, and he expected the men around him to behave in a civil and coherent manner. But Hitler’s government was neither civil nor coherent, and the nation lurched from one inexplicable moment to another.
• p149 - After a few more allusions, [Dodd] came to his ending. “In conclusion,” he said, “one may safely say that it would be no sin if statemen learned enough of history to realize that no system which implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse.”
• p158-9 - Dodd probed further. Suppose, he asked, such an incident were to involve the Ruhr Valley, an industrial region about which Germans were particularly sensitive. France had occupied the Ruhr from 1923 to 1925, causing great economic and political turmoil within Germany. In the event of another such incursion, Dodd asked, would Germany respond militarily on its own or call for an international meeting to resolve the matter? ¶ “That would be my purpose,” Hitler said, “but we might not be able to restrain the German people.”
  • TB: Now who does this sound like?
• p159 - “The Chancellor’s assurances were so satisfying and so unexpected that I think they are on the whole too good to be true,” Messersmith wrote. “We must keep in mind, I believe, that when Hitler says anything he for the moment convinces himself that it is true. He is basically sincere; but he is at the same time a fanatic.”
  • TB: Now who does this sound like?