On the surface, best-selling writer Erik Larson does something silly in his compelling new non-fiction book In the Garden of Beasts. He describes Germany in the 1930s, as Hitler was consolidating power, from the perspective of Martha Dodd, a pretty young writer with an active love life.
Think Carrie Bradshaw in Berlin.
Yet rather than trivializing the subject, this decision makes Garden the kind of book that brings history alive and proves why Larson's Isaac's Storm and The Devil in the White City were such hits.
The politically naive but sexually adventurous Martha was the daughter of the American ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, whose story is just as central to Larson's narrative.
He was an unexpected diplomatic choice for FDR in 1933. A University of Chicago history professor who had lived in Germany, Dodd eventually came to realize the danger Hitler posed and tried to warn the disbelieving State Department. Today, he is considered the "Cassandra of American Diplomats."
At first, his daughter Martha at 24 was openly dazzled by the Nazis. An assistant literary editor at the Chicago Tribune, she left her job to accompany her parents to Germany.
Like Pamela Harriman in wartime London, she attracted powerful men. Her admirers included German princes, French diplomats and Rudolf Diels, head of the Gestapo who would later be imprisoned by Hitler and testify for the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials. And then there was Boris Winogradov, the man Martha considered one of her three great loves (a competitive romantic category). A magnetic Russian who worked for the future KGB, he fell in love with the American ambassador's daughter while trying to recruit her as a Soviet agent.
The entertaining drama of Martha's personal life contrasts with what she witnessed before the family returned to the USA in 1937. Through this appealing but ordinary woman, we see the paranoia, hear the fevered rhetoric, and witness attacks on Berlin's Jews.
Most of all, Larson captures how Martha, most Germans and the rest of world simply couldn't believe what was happening until it was too late.
