In the Garden of Beasts

life in criticism of the existing regime.”
    After exiting the restaurant, the two men walked west along Unter den Linden toward Wilhelmstrasse, the main government thoroughfare. They parted, Dodd wrote, “rather sadly.”
    Dodd returned to his office, worked a couple of hours, then took a long walk around the Tiergarten.

CHAPTER 40
A Writer’s Retreat
    T he increasing evidence of social and political oppression came more and more to trouble Martha, in spite of her enthusiasm for the bright, blond young men whom Hitler attracted by the thousands.One of the most important moments in her education came in May when a friend, Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt, a regular in the salon of Mildred and Arvid Harnack, invited her and Mildred to accompany him for a visit to one of the few prominent authors who had not joined the great flight of artistic talent from Nazi Germany—an exodus that included Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich, Walter Gropius, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Einstein, and composer Otto Klemperer, whose son, actor Werner Klemperer, would go on to portray a kindly, befuddled Nazi prison-camp commandant in the TV series
Hogan’s Heroes
. Ledig-Rowohlt was the illegitimate son of publisher Ernst Rowohlt and worked as an editor in his father’s company. The author in question was Rudolf Ditzen, known universally byhis pseudonym, Hans Fallada.
    The visit was supposed to take place earlier in the year, but Fallada had postponed it until May because of his anxiety over the publication of his latest book,
Once a Jailbird
. By this point Fallada had achieved considerable fame worldwide for his novel
Little Man—What Now?
, about one couple’s struggle during the economic and social upheaval of the Weimar Republic. What made
Once a Jailbird
a subject of such anxiety for Fallada was the fact that it was his first major work to be published since Hitler had become chancellor. He was uncertain of his standing in the eyes of Goebbels’s Reich LiteraryChamber, which claimed the right to decide what constituted acceptable literature. To try to smooth the way for his new book, Fallada included in its introduction a statement that praised the Nazis for ensuring that the awful situation at the center of the book could no longer occur. Even his publisher, Rowohlt, thought Fallada had gone too far and told him the introduction “does seem rather TOO ingratiating.” Fallada kept it.
    In the months following Hitler’s ascension to chancellor, the German writers who were not outright Nazis had quickly divided into two camps—those who believed it was immoral to remain in Germany and those who felt the best strategy was to stay put, recede as much as possible from the world, and wait for the collapse of the Hitler regime. The latter approach became known as “inner emigration,” and was the path Fallada had chosen.
    Martha asked Boris to come along as well. He agreed, despite his previously stated view that Mildred was someone Martha should avoid.
    THEY SET OUT on the morning of Sunday, May 27, for the three-hour drive to Fallada’s farmhouse in Carwitz, in the lake country of Mecklenburg north of Berlin. Boris drove his Ford and of course left the top down. The morning was cool and soft, the roads mostly free of traffic. Once outside the city, Boris accelerated. The Ford sped along country roads lined with chestnut and acacia, the air fragrant with spring.
    Halfway through the drive, the landscape darkened. “Little sharp lines of lightning lit up the sky,” Martha recalled, “and the scene was wild and violent with color, intense electric green and violet, lavender and gray.” A sudden rain sent pellets of water exploding against the windscreen, but even here, to the delight of all, Boris kept the top down. The car raced along on a cloud of spray.
    Abruptly the sky cleared, leaving sun-shafted steam and sudden color, as if they were driving through a painting. The scent of newly moist ground filled the air.
    As they neared Carwitz, they entered a terrain of hills, meadows,and bright blue lakes, laced together with sandy paths. The houses and barns were simple boxes with steeply pitched roofs. They were only three hours from Berlin, yet the place seemed remote and hidden.
    Boris brought the Ford to a stop at an old farmhouse beside a lake. The house stood at the base of a tongue of land called the Bohnenwerder that jutted into the lake and was mounded with hills.
    Fallada emerged from the house