In the Garden of Beasts

Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

By: Erik Larson

Narrated by: Stephen Hoye

Length: 12 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

Erik Larson has been widely acclaimed as a master of narrative non-fiction, and in his new book, the best-selling author of Devil in the White City turns his hand to a remarkable story set during Hitler’s rise to power.

The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.

A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first, Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the “New Germany”, she has one affair after another, including with the suprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate.

As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance - and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler’s true character and ruthless ambition.

Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Göring and the expectedly charming - yet wholly sinister - Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively listenable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror.

©2011 Stephen Hoye (P)2011 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"In this mesmerizing portrait of the Nazi capital, Larson plumbs a far more diabolical urban cauldron than in his bestselling The Devil in the White City... a vivid, atmospheric panorama of the Third Reich and its leaders, including murderous Nazi factional infighting, through the accretion of small crimes and petty thuggery." ( Publishers Weekly)

"By far his best and most enthralling work of novelistic history….Powerful, poignant…a transportingly true story." ( The New York Times)

"[L]ike slipping slowly into a nightmare, with logic perverted and morality upended….It all makes for a powerful, unsettling immediacy." (Bruce Handy, Vanity Fair)

Larson scores again

When it comes to non-fiction writers that can combine two interlocking stories, Larson has no peer. I read audio books for two reasons: to learn and to be entertained. I learned so much I did not know about the rise of the Third Reich, and had never heard anything about our diplomats living in Germany at that time. Larson weaves a great story with so much detail and vividness. I can't imagine the time it took to do the research needed to write a book such as this, but I am so glad that he did.

Excellent!

This book is very well written, extremely well narrated, chilling, and it’s all true. The author did an excellent job, and the narrator does really well expressing emotions and doing the German accents. This is a must-read/listen if you have any interest in learning about Nazi Germany.

Compare with 2020!

Listening to this story is timely for where America is in 2020. The parallels are frightening.

Well written story re Nazism in Pre-WWII Germany

Well-written cautionary true story about how a psychopath like Hitler and his twisted supporters came to impose their evil wills upon Pre-WWII Germany and how their rise to power was ignored or purposely overlooked by European and US officials who were in a position to intervene and head off the war. Many flawed characters. Great narration.

A fun history lesson!

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Yes. It provided an excellent history lesson of what happened during the Third Reich. It provided an understanding of why the German government made those terrible.decisions. They were seeking to restore Germany's prominence on the world stage at any cost. The way the story is told through the Dodd family put the story in a more human perspective versus reading about it in a history textbook.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Martha Dodd was my favorite character. Although I don't agree with her lifestyle choices, she was the most colorful of characters.

Have you listened to any of Stephen Hoye’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

No.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No.

Any additional comments?

Since the book was written as a novel rather than a documentary, it really gave me a better understanding of that era in world history.

Innocents Abroad in Hitler’s Berlin

Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin (2011) recounts the experiences of William E. Dodd, America’s new ambassador to Germany, and his 24-year-old daughter Martha living in Berlin near the Tiergarten (the huge park whose name means the Garden of Beasts), especially during their first year beginning in June 1933. In his prologue, Larson explains that he tried writing a “more intimate” book than “another grand history of that age” like, I suppose, William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960). Larson wanted “to reveal that past world through the experience and perceptions of my two primary subjects, father and daughter, who upon arrival in Berlin embarked on a journey of discovery, transformation, and, ultimately, deepest heartbreak.”

Larson, then, depicts how the scholar, Jeffersonian democratic farmer, and “accidental diplomat” Dodd and his free-spirited and free-loving daughter were “two innocents. . . complicated people moving through a complicated time, before the monsters declared their true nature.” It’s fascinating to read Dodd’s initial attempts to remain objective and neutral, hoping to influence the German regime in a more civilized direction by steadfastly representing American values to them, as well as Martha’s initial infatuation with the Nazi revolution and the seemingly handsome, healthy, and happy Germans she saw everywhere. The major movement of Larson’s book then demonstrates how their first year in Berlin dramatically changed the optimistic views of father and daughter as the beasts in the garden (the Tiergarten park near their rented home serving as a metaphor for Berlin and Germany) began revealing their irrational, ruthless, arrogant, and malevolent natures.

People familiar with that period of German and world history will be familiar with historical highlights like the Reichstag arson trial, the referendum on withdrawing from the League of Nations, the Night of the Long Knives, and the series of laws curtailing Jewish civil and human rights.

I had not known about the many attacks on American citizens who made the mistake of not performing the Nazi salute when storm troopers paraded by. But the most interesting things I learned from Larson’s book concern the personality and role in events of Dodd and his daughter Martha. She was a passionate, independent, naïve, poetic, and romantic woman (engaging in affairs with American writers, French diplomats, Russian spies, Gestapo chiefs, and the like). It was fascinating to read about things like the Dodd family’s increasing and well-founded paranoia that their home phones were bugged, that their servants couldn’t be trusted, and that they were living in an insane country, so that even though they didn’t fear for their physical safety (not even the Nazis would dare to harm the American ambassador or his family), they lived in an intense state of tension making it difficult to converse or sleep. For Dodd this was exacerbated by his realization that members of his own staff were spying on him for his American State Department enemies, members of the “Pretty Good Club” of elite Ivy League millionaires for whom the foreign service and state department was a private boys’ club critical of Dodd’s attempts to rein in expenses and luxuries and of his failures to be sufficiently pro-German and anti-Jewish.

The best part of this book, then, are the intimate details narrated through the letters and diaries and memoirs and so on of the Dodds that tell a true, appalling, and moving story.

Larson writes plenty of witty and neat lines of his own, like, “That tincture of guilt only parents know how to add.” But perhaps he tries too hard to make his book as page-turningly suspenseful as a novel via a bit too much dramatic foreshadowing, the payoffs of which are often not so potent, as when he says, “In light of what was to happen a few years hence, Dodd’s crowing about his own driving prowess can only raise a chill,” or “Up until now she had only seen her father with tears in his eyes once, upon the death of Woodrow Wilson, whom he counted as a good friend. There would be one other occasion, but that was to come in a few more years time.”

And there is an odd moment when Larson sympathizes with Dodd’s attempt to escape the insanity and stress of Berlin by working on his never-finished life work, a definitive and comprehensive multi-volume history of the American south: “Late that afternoon he devoted to quiet hours to his Old South, losing himself in another, more chivalrous age.” I wonder if the slaves would’ve found it a more chivalrous age...

The audiobook reader Stephen Hoye is professional and capable.

People interested in WWII history focusing on Nazi Germany written from an unusual and personal point of view, that of the innocents abroad William and Martha Dodd, should like this book.

good background read.

Enjoyed reading about the activity during the 33 to 39 years from first hand accounts.

Fascinating historical fiction!

If only all school history books could be so interesting during such an ugly time. Fascinating perspective! Very fun to listen to this story through Audible.com!

Very very interesting and heartbreaking

Would you listen to In the Garden of Beasts again? Why?

No, only because of the deep subject matter

Who was your favorite character and why?

Martha because of how naive she was

Have you listened to any of Stephen Hoye’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

No

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No

Any additional comments?

Very good book and the private correspondence of all the diplomats was fascinating

an honest depiction of a troubled time

Where does In the Garden of Beasts rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Very near the top

What other book might you compare In the Garden of Beasts to and why?

Larson's The Devil in the White City which is an all time favorite. Both read like a novel but give you so much exposure to accurate historical events..

Which character – as performed by Stephen Hoye – was your favorite?

I never felt that the narrator was any character but rather telling a true story about many flawed individuals.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The night of a killing in Germany when so many individuals lost their lives and then the spin put on it by Hitler. It seemed it was then that the German people were won over to Hitler' and his rationalization that he was defending and protecting the Fatherland against the enemies in their midst. Then injustice turned into something of a civic duty to the new and vibrant German spirit and the victims (the Jews) became a forgotten and reviled group with no particular face and to whom there was no particular allegiance.

Any additional comments?

This book depicts the subtle growth of evil which is not fully understood until it is too late.
It gives a good picture also of the fallibility of those in power who often do the expedient thing ie FDR.
Dodd is also a good example who in many instances is genuine in his effort to fulfill the duties of his job but aware he cannot be blind to the injustice that is taking place.
Martha comes across as a foolish young woman and all the Dodd family as a whole seems to me to be socially anti-semitic in their readiness to accept the norms of the time.