In the Garden of Beasts

and to listen in as they julienned one another with lacerating commentary delivered in a whisper. At one point the dagger-carrying duke, Koburg, happened to strut past Fromm as she was conversing with Kurt Daluege, a police official whom shedescribed as “brutal and ruthless.” The duke seemed to want to project arrogance, but the effect, Fromm noted, was comically undermined by “his stooped, dwarf-like figure.” Daluege told Fromm, “That Koburg walks as though he were on stilts,” then added with menace: “It might leak out that his grandmother deceived the Grand Duke with that Jewish court banker.”
    At ten the next morning, Fromm telephoned Poulette but only reached her elderly maid, who said, “The Baroness has left a note in the kitchen that she is not to be disturbed.”
    Poulette never slept this late. “Suddenly I understood,” Fromm wrote.
    Poulette wouldn’t be the first Jew or newly classified non-Aryan to try suicide in the wake of Hitler’s rise.Rumors of suicides were common, and indeed a study by the Berlin Jewish Community found that in 1932–34 there were 70.2 suicides per 100,000 Jews in Berlin, up sharply from 50.4 in 1924–26.
    Fromm raced to her garage and drove as quickly as possible to Poulette’s home.
    At the door the servant told her Poulette was still asleep. Fromm brushed past and continued on until she reached Poulette’s bedroom. The room was dark. Fromm opened the curtains. She found Poulette lying in bed, breathing, but with difficulty. Beside the bed, on a night table, were two empty tubes of a barbiturate, Veronal.
    Fromm also found a note addressed to her. “I can’t live anymore because I know I will be forced to give up my work. You have been my best friend, Bella. Please take all my files and use them. I thank you for all the love you gave me. I know you are brave, braver than I am, and you must live because you have a child to think of, and I am sure that you will bear the struggle far better than I could.”
    The household came alive. Doctors arrived but could do nothing.
    The next day an official of the foreign office called Fromm to convey his sorrow and an oblique message. “Frau Bella,” he said, “I am deeply shocked. I know how terrible your loss is. Frau von Huhn died of pneumonia.”
    “Nonsense!” Fromm snapped. “Who told you that? She committed—”
    “Frau Bella, please understand, our friend had pneumonia. Further explanations are undesirable. In your interest, as well.”
    MOST GUESTS HAD FOUND the ball to be a lovely diversion. “We all had a really good time,” wrote Louis Lochner in a letter to his daughter at school in America, “and the party was a jolly one.” Ambassador Dodd, predictably, had a different assessment: “The dinner was a bore, though the company present might under other circumstances have been most informing.”
    One result was unexpected. Instead of embittered estrangement between Dodd and Papen, there grew instead a warm and lasting association. “From that day on,” Sigrid Schultz observed, “Papen himself cultivated the friendship of Ambassador Dodd with the greatest assiduity.” Papen’s behavior toward Schultz also improved. He seemed to have decided, she wrote, that “it was better to display his Sunday manners toward me.” This, she found, was typical of a certain kind of German. “Whenever they come up against someone who will not stand for their arrogance, they climb down from their perch and behave,” she wrote. “They respect character when they meet it, and if more people had shown firmness to Hitler’s handyman Papen and his acolytes in small every day contacts, as well as in big affairs of state, the Nazi growth could have been slowed up.”
    RUMOR SPREAD ABOUT THE true cause of Poulette’s death. After the funeral, Fromm was accompanied home by a good friend to whom she felt a daughterly bond—“Mammi” von Carnap, wife of a former chamberlain to the kaiser and long an excellent source of information for Fromm’s column. Although loyal to the old Germany, the Carnaps were sympathetic to Hitler and his campaign to restore the nation’s strength.
    Mammi seemed to have something on her mind. After a few moments, she said, “Bellachen, we are all so shocked that the new regulations should have this effect!”
    Fromm was startled. “But Mammi,” Fromm said, “don’t you realize?This is only the beginning. This thing will turn against all of you who helped to create