In the Garden of Beasts (2 page)
Read In the Garden of Beasts Online
Authors: Erik Larson
Tags: #Adult, #Biography, #Non-Fiction, #Patriot Bookshelf, #War, #History, #Politics
Burnham’s foot ached. The deck thrummed. No matter where you were on the ship, you felt the power of the
Olympic
‘s twenty-nine boilers transmitted upward through the strakes of the hull. It was the one constant that told you—even in the staterooms and dining chambers and smoking lounge, despite the lavish efforts to make these rooms look as if they had been plucked from the Palace of Versailles or a Jacobean mansion—that you were aboard a ship being propelled far into the bluest reaches of the ocean.
Burnham and Millet were among the few builders of the fair still alive. So many others had gone. Olmsted and Codman. McKim. Hunt. Atwood—mysteriously. And that initial loss, which Burnham still found difficult to comprehend. Soon no one would remain, and the fair would cease to exist as a living memory in anyone’s brain.
Of the key men, who besides Millet was left? Only Louis Sullivan: embittered, perfumed with alcohol, resenting who knew what, but not above coming by Burnham’s office for a loan or to sell some painting or sketch.
At least Frank Millet still seemed strong and healthy and full of the earthy good humor that had so enlivened the long nights during the fair’s construction.
The steward came back. The expression in his eyes had changed. He apologized. He still could not send the message, he said, but at least now he had an explanation. An accident had occurred involving Millet’s ship. In fact, he said, the
Olympic
was at that moment speeding north at maximum velocity to come to her aid, with instructions to receive and care for injured passengers. He knew nothing more.
Burnham shifted his leg, winced, and waited for more news. He hoped that when the
Olympic
at last reached the site of the accident, he would find Millet and hear him tell some outrageous story about the voyage. In the peace of his stateroom, Burnham opened his diary.
That night the fair came back to him with extra clarity.
2011 Crown Publishers International Edition
Copyright © 2011 by Erik Larson
Excerpt from The Devil in the White City copyright © 2003 by Erik Larson.
All rights reserved.
Published by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Photo credits appear on
this page
.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Larson, Erik.
In the garden of beasts : love, terror, and an American family in Hitler’s Berlin / by Erik Larson.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Dodd, William Edward, 1869–1940. 2. Diplomats—United States—Biography. 3. Historians—United States—Biography. 4. Germany—Social conditions—1933–1945. 5. National socialism—Germany. I. Title.
E748.D6L37 2011
943.086—dc22
2010045402
eISBN: 978-0-307-88795-5
Cover design by Whitney Cookman
Cover photograph © The Art Archive/Marc Charmet
v3.1_r1
To the girls, and the
next twenty-five
(and in memory of Molly, a good dog)
CONTENTS
Excerpt from The Devil in the White City
Chapter 1: Means of Escape
Chapter 2: That Vacancy in Berlin
Chapter 3: The Choice
Chapter 4: Dread
Chapter 5: First Night
PART II
House Hunting in the Third Reich
Chapter 6: Seduction
Chapter 7: Hidden Conflict
Chapter 8: Meeting Putzi
Chapter 9: Death Is Death
Chapter 10: Tiergartenstrasse 27a
Chapter 11: Strange Beings
Chapter 12: Brutus
Chapter 13: My Dark Secret
Chapter 14: The Death of Boris
Chapter 15: The “Jewish Problem”
Chapter 16: A Secret Request
Chapter 17: Lucifer’s Run
Chapter 18: Warning from a Friend
Chapter 19: Matchmaker
Chapter 20: The Führer’s Kiss
Chapter 21: The Trouble with George
Chapter 22: The Witness Wore Jackboots
Chapter 23: Boris Dies Again
Chapter 24: Getting Out the Vote
Chapter 25: The Secret Boris
Chapter 26: The Little Press Ball
Chapter 27: O Tannenbaum
Chapter 28: January 1934
Chapter 29: Sniping
Chapter 30: Premonition
Chapter 31: Night Terrors
Chapter 32: Storm Warning
Chapter 33: “Memorandum of a Conversation with Hitler”
Chapter 34: Diels, Afraid
Chapter 35: Confronting the Club
Chapter 36: Saving Diels
Chapter 37: Watchers
Chapter 38: Humbugged
Chapter 39: Dangerous Dining
Chapter 40: A Writer’s Retreat
Chapter 41: Trouble at the Neighbor’s
Chapter 42: Hermann’s Toys
Chapter 43: A Pygmy Speaks
Chapter 44: The Message in the Bathroom
Chapter 45: Mrs. Cerruti’s Distress
Chapter 46: Friday Night
PART VII
When Everything Changed
Chapter 47: “Shoot, Shoot!”
Chapter 48: Guns in the Park
Chapter 49: The Dead
Chapter 50: Among the Living
Chapter 51: Sympathy’s End
Chapter 52: Only the Horses
Chapter 53: Juliet #2
Chapter 54: A Dream of Love
Chapter 55: As Darkness Fell
EPILOGUE
The Queer Bird in Exile
In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost
.
—DANTE ALIGHIERI,
The Divine Comedy: Canto I
(Carlyle-Wicksteed Translation, 1932)
Das Vorspiel
prelude; overture; prologue; preliminary match; foreplay; performance; practical (exam); audition;
das ist erst das ~
that is just for starters
—Collins German Unabridged Dictionary
(seventh edition, 2007)
O
nce, at the dawn of a very dark time, an American father and daughter found themselves suddenly transported from their snug home in Chicago to the heart of Hitler’s Berlin. They remained there for four and a half years, but it is their first year that is the subject of the story to follow, for it coincided with Hitler’s ascent from chancellor to absolute tyrant, when everything hung in the balance and nothing was certain. That first year formed a kind of prologue in which all the themes of the greater epic of war and murder soon to come were laid down.
I have always wondered what it would have been like for an outsider to have witnessed firsthand the gathering dark of Hitler’s rule. How did the city look, what did one hear, see, and smell, and how did diplomats and other visitors interpret the events occurring around them? Hindsight tells us that during that fragile time the course of history could so easily have been changed. Why, then, did no one change it? Why did it take so long to recognize the real danger posed by Hitler and his regime?
Like most people, I acquired my initial sense of the era from books and photographs that left me with the impression that the world of then had no color, only gradients of gray and black. My two main protagonists, however, encountered the flesh-and-blood reality, while also managing the routine obligations of daily life. Every morning they moved through a city hung with immense banners of red, white, and black; they sat at the same outdoor cafés as did the lean, black-suited members of Hitler’s SS, and now and then they caught sight of Hitler himself, a smallish man in a large, open Mercedes. But they also walked each day past homes with balconies lush with red geraniums; they shopped in the city’s vast department stores, held tea parties, and breathed deep the spring fragrances of the Tiergarten, Berlin’s main park. They knew Goebbels and Göring as social acquaintances with whom they dined, danced, and joked—until, as their first year reached its end, an event occurred that proved to be one of the most significant in revealing the true character of Hitler and that laid the keystone for the decade to come. For both father and daughter it changed everything.
This is a work of nonfiction. As always, any material between quotation marks comes from a letter, diary, memoir, or other historical document. I made no effort in these pages to write another grand history of the age. My objective was more intimate: 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.
There are no heroes here, at least not of the
Schindler’s List
variety, but there are glimmers of heroism and people who behave with unexpected grace. Always there is nuance, albeit sometimes of a disturbing nature. That’s the trouble with nonfiction. One has to put aside what we all know
—now
—to be true, and try instead to accompany my two innocents through the world as they experienced it.
These were complicated people moving through a complicated time, before the monsters declared their true nature.
—Erik Larson
Seattle
1933
The Man Behind the Curtain
I
t was common for American expatriates to visit the U.S. consulate in Berlin, but not in the condition exhibited by the man who arrived there on Thursday, June 29, 1933. He was Joseph Schachno, thirty-one years old, a physician from New York who until recently had been practicing medicine in a suburb of Berlin. Now he stood naked in one of the curtained examination rooms on the first floor of the consulate where on more routine days a public-health surgeon would examine visa applicants seeking to immigrate to the United States. The skin had been flayed from much of his body.
