In the Garden of Beasts

seeking respite from Nazi surveillance. The act of driving in the forest provided Fromm one of the few moments when she felt truly safe. “The louder the motor,” she wrote in her diary, “the more I feel at ease.”
    There was nothing carefree about this latest drive, however. Their conversation centered on the law passed the preceding month that barred Jews from editing and writing for German newspapers and required members of the domestic press to present documentation from civil and church records to prove they were “Aryan.” Certain Jews could retain their jobs, namely those who had fought in thepast war or lost a son in battle or who wrote for Jewish newspapers, but only a small number qualified for these exemptions. Any unregistered journalist caught writing or editing faced up to one year in prison. The deadline was January 1, 1934.
    Poulette sounded deeply troubled. Fromm found this perplexing. She herself knew about the requirement, of course. Being Jewish, she had resigned herself to the fact that she would be out of a job by the new year. But Poulette? “Why should
you
worry?” Fromm asked.
    “I have reason, Bella darling. I wrote for my papers, chased all over the place getting them. Finally I found out that my grandmother was Jewish.”
    With that news her life had been abruptly, irrevocably altered. Come January she would join a wholly new social stratum consisting of thousands of people stunned to learn they had Jewish relatives somewhere in their past. Automatically, no matter how thoroughly they had identified themselves as Germans, they became reclassified as non-Aryan and found themselves consigned to new and meager lives on the margins of the Aryans-only world being constructed by Hitler’s government.
    “Nobody knew anything about it,” Poulette told Fromm. “Now I lose my living.”
    By itself the discovery was bad enough, but it also coincided with the anniversary of the death of Poulette’s husband. To Fromm’s surprise, Poulette decided not to attend the Little Press Ball; she was feeling too sad to go.
    Fromm hated to leave her alone that night but went to the ball all the same after resolving that the next day she would visit Poulette and bring her back to her house, where Poulette loved to play with Fromm’s dogs.
    Throughout the evening, in the moments when her mind wasn’t engaged by the antics of those around her, Fromm found herself haunted by thoughts of her friend’s uncharacteristic depression.
    TO DODD, PAPEN’S REMARK ranked as one of the most idiotic he had heard since his arrival in Berlin. And he had heard many. An odd kind of fanciful thinking seemed to have bedazzled Germany, tothe highest levels of government. Earlier in the year, for example,Göring had claimed with utter sobriety that three hundred German Americans had been murdered in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia at the start of the past world war. Messersmith, in a dispatch, observed that even smart, well-traveled Germans will “sit and calmly tell you the most extraordinary fairy tales.”
    Now here was the nation’s vice-chancellor claiming not to understand why the United States had entered the world war against Germany.
    Dodd looked at Papen. “I can tell you that,” he said, his voice just as level and even as before. “It was through the sheer, consummate stupidity of German diplomats.”
    Papen looked stunned. His wife, according to Sigrid Schultz, looked strangely pleased. A new silence filled the table—not one of anticipation, as before, but a charged emptiness—until suddenly everyone sought to fill the chasm with flecks of diverting conversation.
    In another world, another context, it would have been a minor incident, a burst of caustic banter readily forgotten. Amid the oppression and
Gleichschaltung
of Nazi Germany, however, it was something far more important and symbolic. After the ball, as had become custom, a core group of guests retired to Schultz’s flat, where her mother had prepared piles of sandwiches and where the story of Dodd’s verbal swordplay was recounted with great and no doubt drunken flourish. Dodd himself was not present, inclined as he was to leave banquets as early as protocol allowed and head for home to close out the night with a glass of milk, a bowl of stewed peaches, and the comfort of a good book.
    DESPITE HER MOMENTS of upwelling anxiety, Bella Fromm found the ball delightful. Such a pleasure to see how Nazis behaved after a few drinks