In the Garden of Beasts

By pure coincidence, the next book I read after The Orientalist was In the Garden of Beasts, which had been recommended to me by an MSU colleague and was finally available at the library. The setting of both books is very similar: Europe in the interwar years, fraught with the tension of rising Nazism in Germany and rising communism in Russia and Eastern Europe. This book, however, focuses largely an American perspective and American motives for when and why the U.S. tried – or didn’t try – to confront Germany’s Nationalist Socialists.

It starts and ends with the protagonist, a meek, mild-mannered history professor who is far from the first choice for the position of U.S. Ambassador to Germany but is willing to accept it when FDR’s administration essentially runs out of better options. Initially an unsympathetic character, Professor Dodd is hoping for a sabbatical of sorts in accepting the position and moving his family, including his highly promiscuous, scandal prone, 24-year old daughter to Berlin. Initially reluctant to believe, let alone relay, the violence of life in Germany, Dodd soon becomes the loudest voice for the U.S. to take a stronger stance against Germany. Here the story becomes utterly fascinating.

In studying World War II, I particularly remember two reasons for U.S. – and European – reluctance to become involved: 1) Following “The War to End All Wars,” a desire for peace so strong as to blind men and nations to Hitler’s obviously wicked acts and plans. 2) In the U.S., a desire for America to not become bogged down, or even part, or Europe’s “squabbles.” In a word, isolationism. In the Garden of Beasts presents two additional motives: 1) Germany owed the U.S. money and despite, or perhaps because of, the Great Depression, the U.S. and U.S. bonds holders were determined to get it. Time and again Dodd and the State Department go around over the need to press Germany to pay up. Between Germany’s crushing reparations to other European nations and the worldwide depression, this notion is laughable. 2) A concern among top American officials that any attempt to highlight or disparage the increasing anti-Jewish policies in Germany would cause German leaders to point out for all the world the parallels between the Nazi Jewish laws and the Jim Crow laws of the American South (and the treatment of blacks in southern states).

Indeed, I wished this last point had received more attention because it struck me as one of the most compelling reasons for the U.S. failure to denounce Nazism. When I read it, a light bulb went off in my head and it really seemed to me like the missing piece of the puzzle explaining why the U.S. sat idly by waiting for a race of people to be obliterated.

Ultimately, it’s amazing that Dodd took the appointment in the hopes of achieving, essentially, a sabbatical to complete his opus on the antebellum South. In the end, however, he was the most sympathetic character for me and, while I disagreed heartily with his motives for accepting the posting in Berlin, I was truly sorry for him to have not finished his Old South.