“In the Garden of Beasts”: Capra meets “Cabaret”

I want to be Erik Larson when I grow up.

A Seattle-based freelancer, Larson writes popular histories that read like thrillers and turn into New York Times best sellers. You’ll remember “Isaac’s Storm,” about the hurricane that wiped out Galveston, Texas, in 1900 (and about the otherwise brilliant weather man who missed all the signals) and “Devil in the White City,” about the great Chicago “Exposition” (world’s fair) of 1893 (and about the first great American serial killer, who haunted it).

For more about this writer, see: http://eriklarsonbooks.com/ .

Larson’s latest is “In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin” (Crown, $26), and it deserves to be just as widely read. I mean, what more do you need? Nazis. Glamor. Intrigue. Sex. More Sex.

And (to paraphrase the late, great Madeline Kahn in “Blazing Saddles”), it’s twoo! It’s twoo!

The American family of the title were the Dodds from Chicago, Ill. William Edward Dodd (1869-2194), was chairman of the history department at the University of Chicago when Franklin D. Roosevelt picked him to be the U.S. ambassador to Germany.

Dodd, it turns out, was a Tar Heel, born in Clayton, N.C., to a decidedly modest farming family. After scrambling for a college education, he managed to get to Germany and earn his doctorate at the University of Leipzig. (His dissertation was on Thomas Jefferson.) Hew’d beem a friend and biographer of a fellow professor, Woodrow Wilson, and he’d been modestly active in Democratic politics.

In his 60s, and overworked, Dodd had hoped for a nice, cushy embassy job in a small, quiet country, maybe Belgium or the Hague, where nothing much happened, and he’d have spare time to finish his lifelong project, a four-volume history of the Old South. (Intriguingly, Dodd had been the focus of an academic freedom case early in his career, when his criticisms of professional Confederates got him fired from Randolph-Macon.)

FDR, however, had other problems. Nobody wanted the Berlin job. The city was dangerous; people were getting assaulted on the streets. This new guy, name of Hitler, had just taken over as chancellor (i.e. prime minister), but nobody expected him to last. And with Jews complaining about Hitler all the time, the job promised nothing but headaches.

After his second, third and fourth choices chickened out, FDR called up Dodd and asked him to perform his patriotic duty.

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