By Harry T. Cook

8/19/11

In the Garden of Beasts is the title of Erik Larson’s best-selling book. Larson puts a twist on tiergarten — “garden of animals” or “zoo” — to make his point that Berlin of the mid-1930s was a beastly place.

This book — besides being an exquisitely reported and researched piece of work, well-written and in accessible prose — is a cautionary tale. The overall picture it paints has been consigned to history as something that couldn’t happen again or happen here. Think again.

While Larson seems to stay away from that issue, it is ever-present on almost every page. The history is relived through the sensibilities of William Dodd, the first U.S. ambassador to the Third Reich, and as well through the experiences of Dodd’s rather flaky daughter, Martha. Larson’s is an effective method of conveying historical information. The same thing has been accomplished through the medium of fiction.

Although to say so is very unpopular in university English departments, it is a fact that Margaret Mitchell in Gone With the Wind did a decent job illuminating through her fictional characters ante- and post-bellum life in the South. Sinclair Lewis told the story of America in the prosperous 1920s through his sharply drawn characters in Babbitt as did F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby.

Babbitt was a cautionary tale at the time it was written, warning America away from clich ƒ ©d and blas ƒ © middle-class mores, lest its people become personifications of boosterism. The Great Gatsby warned the same people of the perils of easy money, profligate spending and living.

What does Larson’s non-fiction In the Garden of Beasts do? If the reader is paying attention, he or she is warned of how a nation’s politics and governance can be fatally corrupted if its citizens do not remain vigilant.

Germany and its people had suffered grievously for Kaiser Wilhelm’s sins and had been impoverished by the Treaty of Versailles, leaving a huge dent in Germany’s wealth, power and well-being. Yet Berlin remained a Golden City, rivaling Paris and Prague for architectural beauty, art and music — if you could abide the guttural sounds of the German language and what began to unfold at about the time Dodd, the history professor-turned diplomat, arrived there.

The Weimar Republic had become a disaster of first proportions. A people accustomed to orderly and dependable governance were caught flat-footed by their culture’s rotting disintegration. They didn’t understand the concept of national debt. They did not like rising prices, etc. For such things, there must always be someone or something to blame. Until a failed artist from Bavaria stepped largely into their lives, the German people didn’t know whom or what to blame.

Adolf Hitler told them whom to blame: the Jews. Hitler, knowing next to nothing about Judaism or Jewish culture, had nonetheless acquired a forceful antipathy to Jews while in the German army during World War I. Even though he had been succored now and again by a Jewish friend or two, he ended up believing, perversely, that the Jew as a type was Germany’s mortal enemy.

As Daniel Goldhagen pointed out in his 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners,there already existed in Germany an underlying anti-Semitism that could be traced back to the Middle Ages. It was a fateful intersection of a cultural flaw with a new political opportunism.

The trouble had begun nearly 2,000 years before in an historic and bitter defeat of the Roman army by a “race” known as Germans. The Roman historian Tacitus explained in a document later known as Germania why he thought Rome had been defeated: because the Germans possessed fierce blue eyes, tawny hair and huge bodies, had not been tainted by intermarriage but were a distinct and unadulterated people that resembles only itself.

By the 15th century, a copy of Germania had resurfaced and was later adopted by 19th-century racial purists as a paean to German superiority. Unfortunately, Heinrich Himmler of future infamy read a German translation of Germania some time in the mid-1920s and observed in his journal that he had envisioned in the document a replicable picture of the glorious image of the loftiness, purity and nobility of our ancestors. The Nazi Party appropriated Germania for itself, and it became the hymnal of Hitler’s cult-like anti-Semitic mania.

Why is Larson’s book a cautionary tale for us in 2011? Because, as we see in the chaotic political climate of our own country, enemies are rampant.

You have those people who wish to marry those of the same sex; you have a foreign-born black Muslim for president; you have Democrats who still believe that the government should protect the poor and the aged; you have those same poor and aged who are dragging down the economy by receiving what, cynically, are called “entitlements;” finally you have social democrats such as I who believe the wealthy should pay more in taxes than the not-so-wealthy.

When will the eastbound trains of cattle cars come for us?

The megaphonic voices of the tea party are not embarrassed to finger us, alleged enemies of the state. The party apparatchiks are no joke. They are in dead earnest, and, taking a clue from In The Garden of Beasts, American readers will see how a nation and a people can descend into political and moral chaos and be either in denial or in ignorance of what is going on under their noses.

At least the Nazis did not use evangelical Christianity as a weapon.

 © Copyright 2011, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.