In the Garden of Beasts

danced at your ball than if you see him only in business hours.” In 1933 the Little Press Ball was held on the evening of Friday, November 24, six days before the city’s American population would celebrate Thanksgiving.
    Shortly before eight o’clock, the Adlon began receiving the first of a long procession of big cars, many with headlights the size of halved melons. Out stepped an array of senior Nazis, ambassadors, artists, filmmakers, actresses, writers, and of course the foreign correspondents themselves, from countries large and small, all bundled in big coats and furs against the damp, near-freezing air. Among the arrivals were the German state secretary Bernhard von Bülow; Foreign Minister Neurath; French ambassador François-Poncet; Sir Eric Phipps, the British ambassador; and of course the ubiquitous and gigantic Putzi Hanfstaengl. Here too came Bella Fromm, the “Auntie Voss”society columnist, for whom the banquet would prove to be edged with darkest tragedy, albeit of a kind grown increasingly common in the Berlin beyond public view. The Dodds—all four—arrived in their old Chevrolet; Hitler’s vice-chancellor, Franz von Papen, came in a significantly larger and fancier car and, like Dodd, also brought his wife, daughter, and son. Louis Adlon, beaming in tux and tails, greeted each splendid arrival, while bellmen took away furs, coats, and top hats.
    As Dodd was about to find out, in a milieu as supercharged as Berlin, where every public action of a diplomat accrued exaggerated symbolic weight, even a mere bit of conversational sparring across a banquet table could become the stuff of minor legend.
    THE GUESTS MOVED into the hotel, first to the elegant drawing rooms for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, then to the winter-garden hall, beclouded with thousands of hothouse chrysanthemums. The room was always “painfully crowded,” in Schultz’s appraisal, but tradition required that the ball always be held at the Adlon. Custom also called for guests to arrive in formal wear but “without any display of orders or official rank,” as Fromm wrote in her diary, though a few guests anxious to display their enthusiasm for the National Socialist Party wore the drab brown of the Storm Troopers. One guest, a duke named Eduard von Koburg, commander of the SA’s Motorized Forces, walked around wearing a dagger given him by Mussolini.
    The guests were shown to their seats at tables of a kind favored by banquet organizers in Berlin, so agonizingly narrow they put guests in arm’s reach of their peers at the opposite side. Such close quarters had the potential to create awkward social and political situations—putting, say, the mistress of an industrialist across from the man’s wife—so the hosts of each table made sure their seating plans were reviewed by various protocol officials. Some juxtapositions simply could not be avoided. The most important German officials had to be seated not only at the head table, which this year was hosted by the American correspondents, but also close to the captains of the table, Schultz and Louis Lochner, chief of the Berlin bureau ofthe Associated Press, and to the table’s most prominent U.S. figure, Ambassador Dodd. Thus Vice-Chancellor Papen wound up sitting directly opposite Schultz, despite the fact that Papen and Schultz were known to dislike each other.
    Mrs. Dodd also took a prominent seat, as did State Secretary Bülow and Putzi Hanfstaengl; Martha and Bill Jr. and numerous other guests filled out the table. Photographers circled and took picture after picture, the flare from their “flashlights” illuminating whorls of cigar smoke.
    Papen was a handsome man—he resembled the character Topper as played on television years later by the actor Leo G. Carroll. But he had an unsavory reputation as an opportunist and betrayer of trust and was deemed by many to be arrogant in the extreme. Bella Fromm called him the “Gravedigger of the Weimar Republic,” alluding to Papen’s role in engineering the appointment of Hitler as chancellor. Papen was a protégé of President Hindenburg, who affectionately called him Fränzchen, or Little Franz. With Hindenburg in his camp, Papen and fellow intriguers had imagined they could control Hitler. “I have Hindenburg’s confidence,” Papen once crowed. “Within two months we will have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he’ll squeak.” It was possibly the greatest miscalculation of the twentieth century. As