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

I guess I could call this a group biography of William Dodd, a mild-mannered Midwestern professor who became US Ambassador to Germany in 1933, and his daughter Martha Dodd, a female playboy who quickly became infatuated with the glamour of Berlin nightlife. It makes for a readable story as well as a discussion of international attitudes (and blindspots) towards the Nazis as they consolidated power. Martha's memoir seems to have been particularly revealing in regard to her initial fascination with the Nazis and subsequent disillusionment. Strangely, though, the book mainly covers the years 1933 and 1934; it makes quick work of the following couple of years even though Dodd served until 1937.

I do think this work was limited by the author's inability to read German. "The Garden of Beasts" is a very silly translation of "Tiergarten." I wonder what else has been misconstrued. For example, he suggests that the surname "Hanfstaengl" is unpronounceable and bizarre, where I think it's not pretty but perfectly normal. He quotes someone describing himself as an "Evangelical Christian"--but I suspect the document said "evangelisch," which is just the German word for Protestant with none of the connotations that "Evangelical" has in the US. I haven't gone to any particular effort to fact-check Larson's German, but I couldn't write a review of this book without pointing out that there were these moments that seemed off, and he seems to have worked almost entirely from English-language sources.

If you're intrigued by the way this book addresses the question of what people could have been thinking in the early years of the Nazi regime, pick up the excellent novel The Invisible Bridge which explores the theme of the looming Nazi threat with artistry, depth, and power.