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A review by mampdx
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson
4.0
Erik Larson, again, makes compelling reading out of history through the personal stories of U.S. Ambassador William Dodd and his family -- especially his irrepressible, irresponsible daughter Martha -- as they experience Hitler's consolidation of power in Germany from 1933-37. Larson explores the political and moral dilemma Hitler's regime posed to American and European diplomats and politicians, and details the ease with which evil was concealed by the appearance of normalcy and the reluctance of people -- people who truly should have known better -- to delve beneath the surface...lest they then have to take difficult action. Though hampered by his own prejudices, including anti-Semitism, by a romanticized idea of Germany from his student days in Leipzig, and by a fateful lack of skill in political gamesmanship, the scholarly and solidly pedestrian Dodd emerges as something of a hero -- a "diplomatic Cassandra" who could not get the elitists in the "Pretty Good Club" of the diplomatic corps to recognize that they were playing political pattycake with a man of truly ruthless cunning.
I hope that we are no longer so naive about the capacity of "civilized" people to commit horrors, but this history offers some chilling parallels to the current situation in the U.S. -- the kind of PTSD (for the Germans, the fallout of WWI; for us, of 9/11and the Bush Recession) that allows a people to be lied into war, the tendency of sane, moderate voices to discount the capacity of an extremist minority to seize power (this too shall pass, they really can't be as bad as you fear), the lack of outrage at atrocities at home and abroad (spurred by emotional exhaustion?), and the extreme rightward trajectory of our own Republican Party, which now inculcates magical thinking (tax cuts solve everything, science is Satanic, etc.) and bombards the political discourse non-stop with outright lies (climate change is a hoax, Obama is a Kenyan/Socialist/Communist/Atheist/Muslim/Marxist tyrant, Jeep is moving all its jobs to China). With luck, the size and diversity of the U.S. will keep us from sliding over the edge into an American version of fascism (wrapped in the flag, carrying a bible), but Larson's book illuminates just how easily that might occur...in any country.
I hope that we are no longer so naive about the capacity of "civilized" people to commit horrors, but this history offers some chilling parallels to the current situation in the U.S. -- the kind of PTSD (for the Germans, the fallout of WWI; for us, of 9/11and the Bush Recession) that allows a people to be lied into war, the tendency of sane, moderate voices to discount the capacity of an extremist minority to seize power (this too shall pass, they really can't be as bad as you fear), the lack of outrage at atrocities at home and abroad (spurred by emotional exhaustion?), and the extreme rightward trajectory of our own Republican Party, which now inculcates magical thinking (tax cuts solve everything, science is Satanic, etc.) and bombards the political discourse non-stop with outright lies (climate change is a hoax, Obama is a Kenyan/Socialist/Communist/Atheist/Muslim/Marxist tyrant, Jeep is moving all its jobs to China). With luck, the size and diversity of the U.S. will keep us from sliding over the edge into an American version of fascism (wrapped in the flag, carrying a bible), but Larson's book illuminates just how easily that might occur...in any country.