Larson also wrote "Devil in the White City" which you really want to read... it's the one about the serial killer at the Chicago World's Fair that your artsy friends got way too excited about, but not this one. This one is about the years leading up to WWII. So, naturally, you read this one first.
So, the FIVE PAGES of glowing blurb reviews at the front of the book were a little obnoxious, to be honest, and they didn't really make you want to read the book any more than you already did. In fact they were a bit of a turn off since you, like most other male humans, have a need to feel like you got there first and you are the only one who knows about how awesome something is, which is juvenile and foolish. You should really get over that. It's not helpful. But you forged on to the main body of the book anyway, and boy were you glad that you did (even though the maps were terrible! I mean, how are you going to write a good WWII story with crappy maps?).
This book reads like a novel even though it's a non-fiction history book (one of those that everyone makes fun of you for reading). But, Oh My God, it was good! It was fast paced and personable, told from the point of view of FDR's Ambassador to Nazi Germany in 1933 and '34... and the ambassador's daughter, Martha. Oh... Martha....
The ambassador (William E. Dodd) arrives in Germany with Adolf Hitler as the Chancellor, but not yet the all-powerful Fuhrer. Hindenberg is still President and barely keeps Hitler's ambitions in check, but the Nazi party is consolidating their new positions of power and the Dodd family is (and, by extension, you are) granted a first hand view of the de-evolution of a modern Western society, the death of civility and liberty, and the rise of a monstrous state hell-bent on domination and racial purity. But the Nazis' penchant for pageantry and style proves intoxicating for the ambassador's daughter who has affairs with many of them, thereby allowing you to finally view the Nazis through the eyes of a star struck, hedonistic, worldly woman eager to drink in life as deeply as she can. And she certainly does.
Martha falls for several men while living in Germany (even though she has a husband back in the states). Among these several men are, noteably, Rudolf Diels, the head of the gestapo, and Boris Winogradav, first secretary of the the Soviet embassy (and member of the NKVD {read as KGB}). Her experience takes you through both wild unofficial parties and spectacular official Party functions of the State, and her heartbreaks, and heartbreaking, lends the book a personal, feminine quality that you don't often experience in WWII books.
Although Ambassador Dodd is ostensibly the main character in this book, Martha contends for the title. Later in life she became a published author and her gift with writing shows clearly in her journals, which Larson uses as source materials for the book. His writing combined with hers makes some passages read more like well crafted fiction, not historical non-fiction (check out pages 182 & 183).
There is hope throughout the book, even as tragedy after atrocity pile up. Enemies of the Nazis quietly dissapear, Americans are beaten for not giving the Hitler salute, Jews are rounded up and "Jew-lovers" are dragged through streets as examples for the rest of the citizenry to "Stay pure". Some prominent members of Berlin society even commit suicide after it is revealed to the public (and in some cases to themselves) that they have Jewish blood in their veins. And the SA storm troopers are always marching and rallying and burning books.
But there is always hope.
Even as he sends warnings back to America, the ever humble and likeable ambassador Dodd is convinced that Hitler and his thugs will be brought down by the stalwart and reliable voices of their more sane contemporaries in the government. To help them out, Dodd even commits an incredibly brave act and gives a speech to a room full of German government officials in which he condemns totalitarianism and extreme nationalism. Using his credentials as a history professor and published author in the US as his cover, Dodd carefully couches the speech in terms of the Roman Empire's downfall, not Nazi Germany's rise, but everyone knows what he is really talking about. The speech elicits praise and cheers from the moderate members of Berlin society, and howls of outrage and vitriol from the Nazis.
In this moment you were able to see the years leading up to the war, not as an inevitable march to ruin, but as a series of events which were preventable, but whose occurrences piled up on top of one another to culminate in the greatest event in human history (WW II, dummy). It is often easy to get lost in all the foregone conclusions of history books (Of course the US will win the Revolution, and of course America will declare war on Japan after Pearl Harbor), but books like "In the Garden of Beasts" help you remember that nothing is a foregone conclusion. History is not inevitable. As historic events unfold we have to choose to fight them or embrace them, but we must choose. History IS us, WE make it.
Studying how and, more importantly why, things happened is the education you have been trying to give yourself for twenty years now. This book took you a long way down that road.
Also, "In the Garden of Beasts" helped you with a problem you've always had. It helped you get the Nazis hierarchy straight in your head. You remember how you were always confusing Goering and Goebbles? Well not after this book. The two men are given such memorable presence that you'll never again confuse the scrawny, mouse-like propaganda minister (Goebbles) with the rotund gregarious head of the Luftwaffe (Goering).
The book climaxes with the Night of the Long Knives when Hitler and his pals kill or imprison the members of the SA that brought them to power in the first place. It's kind of like that scene in Star Wars when the Emperor orders all the clones to kill the Jedi, except this really happened. It is a cataclysm of violence that Germany hadn't seen before and it sets the stage for Hitler to seize all control throughout Germany a few weeks later when President Hindenburg dies. What a perfect place to leave you on the verge of the greatest war in the history of mankind.
This was one you couldn't put down, man. Seriously. you were vacuuming while reading it a few times.
On to the next book!
-Sam
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