In the Garden of Beasts

tinged with contempt.” He shrugged his shoulders, then sat down at the piano and began hammering away with his usual boisterous élan.
    Later, Hanfstaengl took Martha aside. “Yes,” he said, “there are some people like that among us. People who have blind spots and are humorless—one must be careful not to offend their sensitive souls.”
    For Martha, however, Thomsen’s display had a lingering effect of surprising power, for it eroded—albeit slightly—her enthusiasm for the new Germany, in the way a single ugly phrase can tilt a marriage toward decline.
    “Accustomed all my life to the free exchange of views,” she wrote, “the atmosphere of this evening shocked me and struck me as a sort of violation of the decencies of human relationship.”
    DODD TOO WAS FAST GAINING an appreciation of the prickly sensitivities of the day. No event provided a better measure of these than a speech he gave before the Berlin branch of the American Chamber of Commerce on Columbus Day, October 12, 1933. His talk managed to stir a furor not only in Germany but also, as Dodd was dismayed to learn, within the State Department and among the many Americans who favored keeping the nation from entangling itself in European affairs.
    Dodd believed that an important part of his mission was to exertquiet pressure toward moderation or, as he wrote in a letter to the Chicago lawyer Leo Wormser, “to continue to persuade and entreat men here not to be their own worst enemies.” The invitation to speak seemed to present an ideal opportunity.
    His plan was to use history to telegraph criticism of the Nazi regime, but obliquely, so that only those in the audience with a good grasp of ancient and modern history would understand the underlying message. In America a speech of this nature would have seemed anything but heroic; amid the mounting oppression of Nazi rule, it was positively daring. Dodd explained his motivation in a letter to Jane Addams. “It was because I had seen so much of injustice and domineering little groups, as well as heard the complaints of so many of the best people of the country, that I ventured as far as my position would allow and by historical analogy warned men as solemnly as possible against half-educated leaders being permitted to lead nations into war.”
    He gave the talk the innocuous title “Economic Nationalism.” By citing the rise and fall of Caesar and episodes from French, English, and U.S. history, Dodd sought to warn of the dangers “of arbitrary and minority” government without ever actually mentioning contemporary Germany. It was not the kind of thing a traditional diplomat might have undertaken, but Dodd saw it as simply fulfilling Roosevelt’s original mandate. In defending himself later, Dodd wrote, “The President told me pointedly that he wanted me to be a standing representative and spokesman (on occasion) of American ideals and Philosophy.”
    He spoke in a banquet room at the Adlon Hotel before a large audience that included a number of senior government officials, including Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht and two men from Goebbels’s ministry of propaganda. Dodd knew he was about to step upon very sensitive terrain. He understood as well, given the many foreign correspondents in the room, that the talk would get wide press coverage in Germany, America, and Britain.
    As he began to read, he sensed a quiet excitement permeate the hall. “In times of great stress,” he began, “men are too apt to abandon too much of their past social devices and venture too far uponuncharted courses. And the consequence has always been reaction, sometimes disaster.” He stepped into the deep past to begin his allusive journey with the examples of Tiberius Gracchus, a populist leader, and Julius Caesar. “Half-educated statesmen today swing violently away from the ideal purpose of the first Gracchus and think they find salvation for their troubled fellows in the arbitrary modes of the man who fell an easy victim to the cheap devices of the lewd Cleopatra.” They forget, he said, that “the Caesars succeeded only for a short moment as measured by the test of history.”
    He described similar moments in English and French history and here offered the example of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the powerful minister of finance under Louis XIV. In an apparent allusion to the relationship between Hitler and Hindenburg, he told his audience how Colbert “was granted despotic powers. He dispossessed