In the Garden of Beasts

demonstrations.”
    On a personal level, however, Dodd found such episodes repugnant, utterly alien to what his experience as a student in Leipzig had led him to expect. During family meals he condemned the attacks, but if he hoped for a sympathetic expression of outrage from his daughter, he failed to get it.
    Martha remained inclined to think the best of the new Germany, partly, as she conceded later, out of the simple perverseness of a daughter trying to define herself. “I was trying to find excuses for their excesses, and my father would look at me a bit stonily if tolerantly, and both in private and in public gently label me a young Nazi,” she wrote. “That put me on the defensive for some time and I became temporarily an ardent defender of everything going on.”
    She countered that there was so much else that was good about Germany. In particular, she praised the enthusiasm of the country’s young people and the measures Hitler was taking to reduce unemployment. “I felt there was something noble in the fresh, vigorous, strong young faces I saw everywhere, and would say so combatively every chance I got.” In letters back to America she proclaimed that Germany was undergoing a thrilling rebirth, “and that the pressreports and atrocity stories were isolated examples exaggerated by bitter, closed-minded people.”
    THE SAME FRIDAY that had begun so tumultuously with the attack on the Kaltenborns ended for Dodd in a far more satisfactory manner.
    That evening correspondent Edgar Mowrer set out for Zoo Station to begin his long journey to Tokyo. His wife and daughter accompanied him to the station but only to see him off: they were to stay behind to oversee the packing of the family’s household goods and would follow soon afterward.
    Most of the foreign correspondents in the city converged on the station, as did a few stalwart Germans daring enough to let themselves be seen and identified by the agents who still kept Mowrer under surveillance.
    A Nazi official assigned to make sure Mowrer actually got on the train came up to him and in a wheedling voice asked, “And when are you coming back to Germany, Herr Mowrer?”
    With cinematic flare, Mowrer answered: “Why, when I can come back with about two million of my countrymen.”
    Messersmith embraced him in a display of support intended for the agents keeping watch. In a voice loud enough to be overheard, Messersmith promised that Mowrer’s wife and daughter would follow unmolested. Mowrer was appreciative but had not forgiven Messersmith for failing to support his bid to stay in Germany. As Mowrer climbed aboard the train he turned to Messersmith with a slight smile and said: “And you too, Brutus.”
    For Messersmith it was a crushing remark. “I felt miserable and depressed,” he wrote. “I knew it was the thing for him to do to leave and yet I hated the part that I had played in his leaving.”
    Dodd did not appear. He was glad Mowrer was gone. In a letter to a friend in Chicago, he wrote thatMowrer “was for a time, as you may know, somewhat of a problem here.” Dodd conceded that Mowrer was a talented writer. “His experiences, however, after the publication of his book”—his notoriety and a Pulitzer Prize—“were such that he became rather more sharp and irritable than was best for all parties concerned.”
    Mowrer and his family made it safely to Tokyo. His wife, Lillian, recalled her great sorrow at having to leave Berlin. “Nowhere have I had such lovely friends as in Germany,” she wrote. “Looking back on it all is like seeing someone you love go mad—and do horrible things.”
    THE DEMANDS OF PROTOCOL —in German,
Protokoll
—descended over Dodd’s days like a black fog and kept him from the thing he loved most, his
Old South
. With his status as ambassador now official, his routine diplomatic responsibilities suddenly swelled, to a degree that caused him dismay. In a letter to Secretary of State Hull, he wrote, “The protokoll arbiters of one’s social behavior follow precedent, and commit one to entertainments the early part of one’s residence which are substantially useless, and which give every one of the various embassies and ministries the ‘social’ right to offer grand dinners.”
    It started almost immediately. Protocol required that he give a reception for the entire diplomatic corps. He expected forty to fifty guests but then learned that each diplomat planned to bring one or more members of his staff,