After rereading Devil in the White City a few months ago, I realized I should look into more of Erik Larson’s works. Although In the Garden of Beasts is not his highest rated work, I find the subject matter of Germany leading up to World War II to be both fascinating and disturbingly relevant in 2025.
Larson does a great job of providing insight into how easy it was for some people to overlook the Nazification of Germany, and in particular Berlin. We look at the new US ambassador, William Dodd, to Germany as he enters Berlin in the 1930s, just in time to watch Nazis rise to power. There are examples and letters of how much even his own kids tried to overlook the threat that the Nazis pose. Tourists and the American government as a whole were often distracted from the eradication of Jewish rights and assumed that Germany’s changes were not the major historic events that they were, while those that Hitler supplanted in Germany underestimated the Nazi faction as too stupid to accomplish the sweeping changes they were inclined to attempt. I very much enjoyed this book in part because I see so many similar events happening in the United States over the past decade, so that might be part of why I seem to like this book so much more than others.
I also think that Larson does a great job of weaving the personal story of the Dodd family into the broader narrative, as it gives context to how different these events all apparently felt then compared to how they are remembered now. We see the dynamics of the Berlin social scene from both Dodd’s perspective with the cultural leaders, but also through the lens of his daughter’s forays into the Berlin nightlife as a twenty-something. We are additionally able to see that while Dodd struggles in Berlin with the Nazi regime, he is dealing with internal sniping in the State Department because of how little attention was being paid to Hitler and his horrific regime until it was too late.
My Score
Goodreads Score
3.89