In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt needed someone to fill the post of U.S. ambassador to Germany, and almost nobody wanted the job. Several heavyweight names turned the offer down, afraid of what Hitler's rise might mean for anyone's career. That is how the choice fell on William Dodd, a history professor at the University of Chicago, a specialist in the American South with no experience at all in high-level diplomacy.

Dodd accepted for a practical reason: he needed time and a steady salary to finish a big book on American history that he had been writing for years. Berlin, he figured, would be a quiet post, almost a retreat paid for by the government. He had no idea how much he was about to witness.

Unlike career diplomats, he brought the habits of a public school teacher: thrift in daily life, distrust of expensive parties, a taste for solitary work. That simple style, which at first seemed out of place in an embassy, also ended up giving him a rawer view of what was happening around him.

Dodd's wife, his son, and his daughter Martha sailed with him to Germany in the very year Hitler became chancellor. The city that received them mixed two moods at once: a capital that seemed to have come out of the economic crisis, with clean streets and trains on time, and a capital full of flags, parades, and uniformed men on nearly every corner.

In the first months, most foreigners in Berlin saw only the first half of the picture. Full hotels, music in the cafés, a sense of order after years of inflation and unemployment. It was easy, for anyone not paying attention to the details, to think Germany was simply recovering.

But the details were there, and they grew fast: posters calling for a boycott of Jewish-owned shops, arrests without trial, people vanishing for days after saying the wrong thing in a bar. The Dodd family arrived right in the middle of this transition, with enough time to watch the city change its face year after year.

The book's title comes from the Tiergarten, the great park in the center of Berlin, near the house where the Dodds went to live. Centuries earlier, the place had been a hunting reserve of the Prussian royals, a literal garden full of animals let loose for the amusement of the nobles. In the Dodd family's day, it was already a public park, with trails, horses, and Sunday strolls.

Erik Larson uses the name with a double meaning. On one side, the real park, where the family went riding and talking among the trees, a breather inside the tense city. On the other, a metaphor for all of Berlin: a garden beautiful on the outside, walled in, where the beasts of the new regime moved ever more freely.

That image carries the tone of the whole book: behind the greenery, the music bands, and the impeccable manners in the salons, a machinery of surveillance and violence was growing day after day, almost always out of sight of those who only strolled the avenues.