In the Garden of Beasts

elsewhere. However, they only dared to commit such infractions in private or among trusted friends, for they understood that the consequences could be lethal.
    For the Dodds, at first, it was all so novel and unlikely as to be almost funny. Martha laughed the first time her friend Mildred Fish Harnack insisted they go into a bathroom for a private conversation. Mildred believed that bathrooms, being sparsely furnished, were more difficult to fit with listening devices than a cluttered living room. Even then Mildred would “whisper almost inaudibly,” Martha wrote.
    It was Rudolf Diels who first conveyed to Martha the unfunny reality of Germany’s emerging culture of surveillance.One day he invited her to his office and with evident pride showed her an array of equipment used for recording telephone conversations. He led her to believe that eavesdropping apparatus had indeed been installed in the chancery of the U.S. embassy and in her home. Prevailing wisdom held that Nazi agents hid their microphones in telephones to pick up conversations in the surrounding rooms. Late one night, Diels seemed to confirm this. Martha and he had gone dancing. Afterward, upon arrival at her house, Diels accompanied her upstairs to the library for a drink. He was uneasy and wanted to talk. Martha grabbed a large pillow, then walked across the room toward her father’s desk. Diels, perplexed, asked what she was doing. She told him she planned to put the pillow over the telephone. Diels nodded slowly, she recalled, and “a sinister smile crossed his lips.”
    She told her father about it the next day. The news surprised him.Though he accepted the fact of intercepted mail, tapped telephones and telegraph lines, and the likelihood of eavesdropping at the chancery, he never would have imagined a government so brazen as to place microphones in a diplomat’s private residence. He took it seriously, however. By now he had seen enough unexpected behavior from Hitler and his underlings to show him that anything was possible.He filled a cardboard box with cotton, Martha recalled, and used it to cover his own telephone whenever a conversation in the library shifted to confidential territory.
    As time passed the Dodds found themselves confronting an amorphous anxiety that infiltrated their days and gradually altered the way they led their lives. The change came about slowly, arriving like a pale mist that slipped into every crevice. It was something everyone who lived in Berlin seemed to experience. You began to think differently about whom you met for lunch and for that matter what café or restaurant you chose, because rumors circulated about which establishments were favorite targets of Gestapo agents—the bar at the Adlon, for example. You lingered at street corners a beat or two longer to see if the faces you saw at the last corner had now turned up at this one. In the most casual of circumstances you spoke carefully and paid attention to those around you in a way you never had before. Berliners came to practice what became known as “the German glance”—
der deutsche Blick
—a quick look in all directions when encountering a friend or acquaintance on the street.
    The Dodds’ home life became less and less spontaneous. They grew especially to distrust their butler, Fritz, who had a knack for moving soundlessly. Martha suspected that he listened in when she had friends and lovers in the house.Whenever he appeared in the midst of a family conversation, the talk would wither and become desultory, an almost unconscious reaction.
    After vacations and weekends away, the family’s return was always darkened by the likelihood that in their absence new devices had been installed, old ones refreshed. “There is no way on earth one can describe in the coldness of words on paper what this espionage can do to the human being,” Martha wrote. It suppressed routine discourse—“the family’s conferences and freedom of speech andaction were so circumscribed we lost even the faintest resemblance to a normal American family. Whenever we wanted to talk we had to look around corners and behind doors, watch for the telephone and speak in whispers.” The strain of all this took a toll on Martha’s mother. “As time went on, and the horror increased,” Martha wrote, “her courtesy and graciousness towards the Nazi officials she was forced to meet, entertain, and sit beside, became so intense a burden she could scarcely bear it.”
    Martha