I took my daughter to a nature preserve lake where they let you rent boats. It was a scorching hot summer day but she was determined to get out on the lake. I got her in the boat first and then got ready to get in myself when she screamed snake and pointed behind the boat. There was a log in the water and all I saw were branches until one of them turned and looked at me. A water snake sat not ten feet from my daughter and we were clearly interrupting his dragonfly lunch. We all froze. Seeing that he was not moving towards us (phew!) I grabbed the camera hanging around my neck and snapped a quick picture before he eerily slipped back into the water.
At the time, I was reading Eric Larson’s book In The Garden Of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin. I felt that the picture was a good metaphor for the book. I picked up the book simply based on the author’s ability to warp the reader right into his scenes like he did in The Devil in the White City. In Beasts, Larson examines the much told nightmare story of the Nazi’s through an interesting vantage point, the US Ambassador William Dodd and his family residing in Berlin during the rise of the Nazi’s in the thirties.
The book is organized into many short chapters or vignettes on the comings and goings of Ambassador Dodd and his family. My favorite chapter was entitled “Only the Horses” near the end of the book. Hitler had just completed his June 30, 1934 murder spree which would come to be called The Knight Of The Long Knives. Hilter addressed the Reichstag openly saying things like:
Only a ferocious and bloody repression could nip the revolt in the bud… If someone asks me why we did not use the regular courts I would reply: at the moment I was responsible for the German nation; consequently, it was I alone who, during those twenty-four hours, was the Supreme Court of Justice of the German People. I ordered the leaders of the guilty shot … The nation must know that its existence cannot be menaced with impunity by anyone, and that whoever lifts his hand against the State shall die of it.
Sadly, as Larson observes, “No government recalled its ambassador or filed a protest; the populace did not rise in revulsion.” Ambassador Dodd for his part observed in his diary an equally sad irony:
At a time when hundreds of men have been put to death without trial or any sort of evidence of guilt, and when the population literally trembles with fear, animals have rights guaranteed them which men and women cannot think of expecting … One might easily wish he were a horse!”
While I much more prefer the World War II era book Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, I do also recommend Beasts in the Garden by Eric Larson. While at times limited and meandering because of the singular focus on the American Ambassador and his family, the focus seems rewarded in the end by humanizing what was such an insane chapter in human history.
Copyright 2011 King Mediary, Inc.
