Larson's In the Garden of Beasts: a real-life Hunger Games (#1)

It took me a good three weeks to read this book -- and I was forced to hurry things up because the library automatically grabs e-books back -- but that was mostly about work. I quite enjoyed Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts, so much so that I put his other book Devil in the White City on my 2012 reading list.

While I don't read many World World II-era boooks, I feel like most of the general interest tomes (along with movies about the time) tend to concentrate on the actual war (Pearl Harbor, Atonement, Inglorious Basterds, Slaughterhouse-Five, The English Patient, Band of Brothers). But In the Garden of Beasts takes a different tack: Larson concentrates on an overlooked period of time, that of 1933-1934, the lead-up to the war. The book is a biography of William Dodd, a professor and historian from Chicago, who unexpectedly ends up as the ambassador to Germany, even though he's not really qualified for diplomatic service, especially to a nation undergoing such significant changes. Although his wife and son accompany him, the book is really about Dodd and his 20-something daughter Martha and their experiences in Berlin their first year out of four. As Larson writes in the first page of prologue, "That first year formed a kind of prologue in which all the themes of the greater epic of war and murder soon to come were laid down.” The story of the Dodds is really the common story of innocents entering the lion's den and having to figure out how to survive -- in that respect, In the Garden of Beasts ain't all that far off from Harry Potter or The Hunger Games...except that they were real people facing actual evil.

But, as Larson points out, there are very few heroes in non-fiction, and neither Martha nor Dodd get anywhere near that label. When they get there in 1933, Hitler has just been appointed Chancellor because President Hindenberg and his political allies think they'll be able to keep him under control. As we all know, that was a really poor calculation, because in the end, it turned out he was the one in control -- because he was the one willing to go to extraordinary and brutal lengths to maintain power. Hitler and his party spend those early years getting the German people in line, condensing their own power and bit by bit dismantling the rights of Germany's Jews. While other countries express "concern," especially when their own nationals are assaulted in Germany by fanatical youth, no one really appreciates the true nature of what is happening -- except for Dodd. But because he's a poor man in a rich boys' State Department and no one wants to take on Germany's "national" problems at this point, Dodd basically gets pushed aside. That actually makes for In the Garden of Beasts' biggest flaws -- in some respects, I felt like the novel never moved past an introduction, or to use film parlance, into the second act. He spends a lot of time observing but never really does much.

Martha, on the other hand, is a doer, but she's not the most likeable of girls. She is self-absorbed and naïve (but felt herself to be worldly); she seems to be someone who cannot be content with what she has, and she likes trouble and being the center of attention, which is why she flits from lover to lover, including Gestapo head Rudolf Diels and a KGB agent named Boris. Apparently she liked being with the married Diels because she enjoyed being known as the woman who slept with the devil -- I think that says it all.

In the Garden of Beasts essentially ends with the Night of the Long Knives, a deadly purge in 1934 that really consolidates Hitler's power. Although Dodd and his family stay in Berlin for a total of 4.5 years, the book basically jumps from this point to 1937, when Dodd leaves his position and without having accomplished much. In that respect, it's sort of a sad ending -- Dodd wanted to be an ambassador, hoping he'd have a lot of free time in which to finish his masterpiece, the Old South, but he doesn't get that in Germany and he doesn't live long enough to really even see the war. 

Despite my feeling that In the Garden of Beasts never really started, I quite liked the in-depth look into 1933-1934 Germany. Those years laid the foundation for what would happen later, and besides being an in-depth snapshot of a certain place at a certain time, it's important look at the poor decisions and apathy that would lead to the deaths of millions of people across Europe, Asia and the Americas.