In the Garden of Beasts

the family rallied and went down to the hotel restaurant for dinner, where Dodd dusted off his decades-old German and in his dry manner tried to joke with the waiters. He was, Martha wrote, “in magnificent humor.” The waiters, more accustomed to the imperious behavior of world dignitaries and Nazi officials, were unsure how to respond and adopted a level of politeness that Martha found almost obsequious. The food was good, she judged, but heavy, classically German, and demanded an after-dinner walk.
    Outside, the Dodds turned left and walked along Bellevuestrasse through the shadows of trees and the penumbrae of streetlamps. The dim lighting evoked for Martha the somnolence of rural American towns very late at night. She saw no soldiers, no police. The night was soft and lovely; “everything,” she wrote, “was peaceful, romantic, strange, nostalgic.”
    They continued on to the end of the street and crossed a small square into the Tiergarten, Berlin’s equivalent of Central Park. The name, in literal translation, meant “animal garden” or “garden of the beasts,” which harked back to its deeper past, when it was a hunting preserve for royalty. Now it was 630 acres of trees, walkways, riding paths and statuary that spread west from the Brandenburg Gate to the wealthy residential and shopping district of Charlottenburg. The Spree ran along its northern boundary; the city’s famous zoo stood atits southwest corner. At night the park was especially alluring. “In the Tiergarten,” a British diplomat wrote, “the little lamps flicker among the little trees, and the grass is starred with the fireflies of a thousand cigarettes.”
    The Dodds entered the Siegesallee—Avenue of Victory—lined with ninety-six statues and busts of past Prussian leaders, among them Frederick the Great, various lesser Fredericks, and such once-bright stars as Albert the Bear, Henry the Child, and Otho the Lazy. Berliners called them
Puppen
—dolls. Dodd held forth on the history of each, revealing the detailed knowledge of Germany he had acquired in Leipzig three decades earlier. Martha could tell that his sense of foreboding had dissipated. “I am sure this was one of the happiest evenings we spent in Germany,” she wrote. “All of us were full of joy and peace.”
    Her father had loved Germany ever since his tenure in Leipzig, when each day a young woman brought fresh violets for his room. Now on this first night, as they walked along the Avenue of Victory, Martha too felt a rush of affection for the country. The city, the overall atmosphere, was nothing like what news reports back home had led her to expect. “I felt the press had badly maligned the country and I wanted to proclaim the warmth and friendliness of the people, the soft summer night with its fragrance of trees and flowers, the serenity of the streets.”
    This was July 13, 1933.

PART II
House Hunting in the Third Reich

    Ambassador Dodd at his desk
( photo credit p2.1 )

CHAPTER 6
Seduction
    I n her first few days in Berlin, Martha fell ill with a cold. As she lay convalescing at the Esplanade she received a visitor, an American woman named Sigrid Schultz, who for the preceding fourteen years had been a correspondent in Berlin for Martha’s former employer, the
Chicago Tribune
, and was now its correspondent in chief for Central Europe. Schultz was forty years old, five foot three—the same height as Martha—with blond hair and blue eyes. “A little pudgy,” as Martha put it, with “an abundance of golden hair.” Despite her size and cherub’s gleam, Schultz was known to fellow correspondents and Nazi officials alike as being tenacious, outspoken, and utterly fearless. She made every diplomat’s invitation list and was a regular at parties thrown by Goebbels, Göring, and other Nazi leaders. Göring took a perverse delight in calling her “the dragon from Chicago.”
    Schultz and Martha chatted at first about innocuous things, but soon the conversation turned to the rapid transformation of Berlin during the six months since Hitler had become chancellor. Schultz told stories of violence against Jews, communists, and anyone the Nazis saw as unsympathetic to their revolution. In some cases the victims had been American citizens.
    Martha countered that Germany was in the midst of a historic rebirth. Those incidents that did occur surely were only inadvertent expressions of the wild enthusiasm that had gripped the country. In the few days since