Don't Interrupt My Party With Your Diplomacy

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've always been a bit of a history junkie, and the era of World War II is one in which I'm particularly interested. Most of the books I've read have been about the actual war. The stuff I know about the lead-up to the war are those things that took place in the late 1930s, which most of us would know from school classes. Larson's book, though, goes into detail about the political landscape of 1933-1938 Germany (focusing mostly on 1933-1934), just a year or so after Hitler was named Chancellor by President Hindenburg.

Larson's book is a narrative history/biography of William Dodd, the ambassador to Germany in 1933 and his daughter, Martha Dodd. Bill Dodd was a history professor at the University of Chicago when he was appointed to his post by FDR. Because of his lack of experience in the diplomatic corp and his modest finances he is seen as an outsider by the State Department and members of his own embassy (who referred to themselves as a "Pretty Good Club"). During his 4 or so years in Berlin, Dodd not only must deal with the building power of the Nazi regime, he has to deal with the resistance he gets from his own office. Dodd complains about this "Pretty Good Club" often in telegrams and letters, where he writes about embassy workers who attend cocktail parties in the afternoons, card parties in the evening, and won't get out of bed before 10am. Of course, the complaints are counterproductive and work against him...as he's complaining about the Pretty Good Club to the leaders of the club in Washington.

Because the diplomatic corps was more concerned about cocktail parties and seating charts for banquets, the attention that Dodd was trying to bring to the mounting horrors of Nazism was largely brushed aside and minimized - it might have gotten in the way of all the parties!

The book is timely and important. As Dodd reminds his superiors at the State Department, if we ignore the clues that history provides to help us understand current events, we're apt to get ourselves in a lot of trouble. Dodd's specific warnings had to do with the world's appeasement of Hitler's government. The response he often got was one rooted in American isolationism..."America can't get itself involved in the domestic affairs of other countries." Of course, this caused quite a headache a few years later in Nazi Germany.

As I was reading the book, I kept wondering how we walk the line of isolationism today. When do we decide to get involved in the domestic affairs of, say, Iraq (that one didn't take us long to decide *ahem*oil*ahem*)? What about others - Sudan, Burma, Mexico, etc. - whose populations have suffered for years? Are we being diplomatically smart or are we too concerned about evening card parties and sleeping until ten?

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