Q&A: Author Erik Larson

this week on Q&A Eric Larson best-selling author of the devil in the White City and thunderstruck mr. Larson discusses his latest book in the garden of beasts a historical narrative following the family of America's first ambassador to Adolf Hitler's Third Reich in 1933 Eric Larson author of in the garden of beasts I want to show you a picture and get your immediate reaction Hitler Hitler in in practicing for one of his one of his amazing speeches in your book why I have that in at the start of one segment I and first of all I have very few photographs and we can talk about why but I had that at a particular place in the book because it signals what's coming next the madness is intensifying at this point what did you learn about mr. Hitler you didn't know before you started your book what I didn't it's not so much what I learned well I learned that his favorite movie was King Kong I hadn't known that it's not so much what I learned about Hitler that I didn't know before it's what I learned about what people thought of Hitler in these early days that really I found very striking what do you see there I see Hitler and his his one-time friend and an ally thug Captain Ernst röhm in a moment of of really kind of it's hard to describe their their their their looks and the reason I included that in the book was because it just somehow captured their kind of malignant thuggish this what about Ernest wrong yeah he was he was Hitler's friend and an enforcer essentially at the beginning of their rise to power he was the is the chief of the stormtroopers a million man plus paramilitary force and when when Hitler needed something something done there was captain rom to coerce those who were were resistant to getting it done what's the timeframe of your book unless the action takes place in 1933-34 so very early days after the time when Hitler was appointed Chancellor and including the point where he becomes the absolute leader the Fuhrer of Germany in the summer of 1934 there are three things I want to ask you about in the book to define them there's the essay the SS and the Gestapo yeah yeah how do they differ okay the the essay that is the shorthand those are the stormtroopers those are the folks who are commanded by Captain Ernst Roehm the SS technically SS was part of the essay but not really it was a very very elite group of men who were supposed to be well initially Hitler's selected guard the Gestapo different anything entirely in 1933 the Gestapo was founded to become to be a secret police agency to keep tabs on political opposition and so forth brand-new as of April 1933 here's a photograph of man named William Dodds who is he in your book yeah William edad was the became the America's first ambassador to Nazi Germany prior to that he was a professor of history at the University of Chicago mild-mannered guy this this photograph actually became the subject of some mirth in the State Department where we're people a senior senior men were not really very pleased that Roosevelt went directly and and hired hired died to this position this photograph shows dwarfed by a tapestry behind him and by his desk and those who were his opponents in Washington felt it was really kind of a funny photograph this is a picture of his daughter Martha her role in your book yeah that's not her best shot I have to say but there a glam shot in my book that we have another one syringe oh yeah I wonder who look yeah Martha was his his daughter and the reason that I found her yeah there she is in her glory the reason I had the reason I did this book is Martha because when she arrived in Berlin with the family she she was in love with what she referred to as the Nazi Revolution she was enthralled by the Nazis which is really struck me as a completely surprising thing given given what we all know hindsight I mean how could you actually be in thrall with the Nazi Revolution but there she was and that was not an unusual position for somebody to have go back to William died it was professor at the University of Chicago and 1933 you said that he was the first ambassador to the Nazi regime yes how did Hitler become Chancellor and then the ultimate Fuehrer of the country yeah Hitler interestingly and I guess I didn't really know this before I went into this book but but Hitler was appointed Chancellor in early and early in 1933 and essentially a deal a political deal those who engineered this deal felt that they could control him and were obviously proven proven wrong he became the the he didn't possess all powers initially he was Chancellor President Hindenburg had has ultimate say over whether the government would survive or not but in the following August of 1934 when Hindenburg died it was then that Hitler engineered not really a coup but essentially seized through various mesh nations seized the powers that Hindenburg had had and became the absolute ruler of Germany we have a photograph of William Dodd and his wife Mattie how book whirl did she play in this story yeah Mattie uh you know obviously she's when when he does wife she she was in my book she actually just kind of takes kind of a a background physician mainly because sadly enough there just is not a lot of material out there about her she's kind of a stabilizing force in the family a very very charming soft-spoken southern Southern woman who finds herself in the midst of this this cauldron of the Nazi regime and found herself really she really disliked a lot of a lot of the Nazis but also curiously liked others I mean like for example she was the hostess of a family of course and one of the senior officials the head of the Reichsbank she loved having him come to parties because he was always willing to fill an empty seat at the table if somebody canceled that I'm at dinner party or something so see so she liked some of the higher-ups but she was just really unhappy with with with all the trappings and the kind of malevolence of the Nazi regime you wrote on a blog that you have that anybody can look at and when do you start there anybody who wants to spend a nice boring afternoon and they can feel free to check my blog when did you start the blog when you said in one of your blog posts and you were late to the game I was very late to the game I started this I started my website to launch my website in January of this year and I started it because I felt that you know I wanted to communicate information about this book as its launch approached and also because I wanted to I wanted people to know that I had written more than one book early in July you you wrote this once again I'm stranded in the quote dark country of no ideas unquote as a friend of mine once described it that placed that place where I end up after completing a book I want you to go back to the dark place before this book yeah where was that dark place and how did you get out of it yeah yeah well let me just explain first what that means I mean whenever I finish a book I I don't know why this is the case but whenever I finish the book I I have I do not have a backlog of ideas to immediately go to it's like all the other ideas that I ever entertained have disappeared I start with a blank slate don't know why that is for a lot of writers that is not the case and it is kind of for me a very hard place to be because I want to feel productive and yet I have nothing to really work on it's it's merely a it's a process at that point of putting myself in the way of luck trying to find this next book idea so this goes back to probably five or six years ago we're not to say that I've been working on this for five or six years this book took probably about four years altogether but about five or six years ago after completing my previous book thunderstruck I was again in this dark country I was trying to think of something to work on and really just to jumpstart my thinking I went to a bookstore in Seattle where I live and just started browsing the history section and just kind of seeing what covers of books would appeal to me what covers were were sort of an immediate turn-off to me what bored me just to kind of get my mind thinking in different channels and I came across a book face out in the shelf that I had always meant to read 1,200 pages tiny print kind of intimidating no photographs and it was William shears the rise and fall of the Third Reich decided I had nothing better to do took the book home start reading loved it but what really lit my imagination was the fact that sheer the the author had actually been there in Berlin in these early days he came in 1934 had met these characters we know today to be icons of ye'll Hitler kerbals carrying all these people in in social context as well as formal context and what occurred to me then is what would that have been like to have met these people when you didn't know the ending when you didn't know what was coming down the pike how would you have appraised that how would you have have viewed them at that time I started thinking about that more and more and I went to try it on some other book ideas but I kept coming back to this idea wouldn't that be interesting so I started looking for characters through whose eyes I could tell that story ideally Outsiders ideally Americans and that's when I stumbled upon William B Dodd the first ambassador Nazi Germany and his daughter where did you stumble on upon him yeah dad dad I started reading I started reading all up as many personal memoirs and Diaries from that area as I as I could and at some point came across William Meads diary published diary and read that and I liked I liked it very much I liked I liked Dodd as as an individual I liked his story the fact that out of the blue he became the ambassador to Nazi Germany when really there was no good reason for him to be an ambassador he had no diplomatic training nothing so I really liked that but I wasn't I wasn't so enamored of him at that point that I wanted to hang an entire book on him it was when I stumbled across his daughters memoir which is you know probably a soon after that that was when I realized yeah these might be my my characters these might be the people I want to follow into Nazi Germany because they both have had such different orientations at first but they both undergo what I see as very compelling personal transformations and as you know you know and I mean in fiction you you can't write a good novel without having a character be transformed in one way or another in nonfiction that you have to go with what you've got it is relatively rare to find people let alone two people in the same family who undergo a very satisfying real-life transformation you're still in a dark spot of news right now for the next one now that this book is done yeah I'm looking for the for the next and I've killed off a couple of ideas thus far so how many affairs did Martha have that you could find and why was it how could you why were you able to find all example first of all I don't I don't know how many affairs she she ultimately had I I can talk about some of the key affairs and she had quite a few affairs she was she was she was well addressing first the the how does one know first of all she tells us she tells us in her her memoir and in her papers at the Library of Congress she makes a lot of reference to there were a lot of reference to the people she knew and and and and and it became involved in affairs with she was one of these people who you know we all have met them and we've probably all some extent dislike them because we want to be like them she's one of these people who had immense personal charm these of you the opposite sex you go through her early papers you find even even when she was in what would have been late high school early college she was courted by people who ordinarily would be courting older and maybe more sophisticated women I mean she was she just had that thing let me interrupt just to show a picture of Carl Sandburg but he learned early in your book that she did she have a affair with him she had an affair with him and in fact one of the one of the delights of my of the research process and and I always do my own research and and in large part that's because of moments I'm about to describe as going through Martha's papers at the Library of Congress and she has I believe the total is seventy linear feet of documents at the Library of Congress and in one file as I was going through all all of her her papers I came across you know clear plastic archival envelope I came across two lakhs of Carl Sandburg hair tied each at one end with the thick the old like black coat thread and I just found it absolutely charming there they were tuned locks of Carl Sandburg hair and I can I can report that his hair really was quite quite blonde and I just actually quick course as well and you put it on your blog but you didn't put it in the book well I I mentioned I think I mentioned his his his locks somewhere I'm done about the photograph I mean you didn't the photograph is not in your book but and yeah let me just stop you there to also ask you you made a comment earlier about the decision on what photographs to run and what not to run we showed earlier photo essay of Martha but you didn't put that one in the book I didn't put that in the book because well for a couple of reasons I wanted to have I wanted to have her her more glamorous image in the book because I think that more more captures how she came off to the people she encountered in real life you know with photographs the photographs it's it's very hard you could see them one photograph of Martha and find yourself thinking this woman was attracted she had all these affairs what was this like this right here yes right but she was yeah I think the glamorous photograph really sort of captured better the sense of what people saw who who encountered her on a daily basis in in Berlin and that well what about dear I mean we're gonna show some photographs that aren't in here but what would your overall philosophy of what the robbery was not to run I have a very sort of peculiar view of photographs in books frankly if it were entirely up to me I would have no photographs in the book whatsoever because it is my goal my strangeness Mae snout is not necessarily my goal to inform it is my goal to create historical experience with my books my dream my ideal is that someone picks up a book of mine starts reading it and just let themselves sink into the past and then read the things straight through and emerge at the end feeling as though they've lived in another in another world entirely photographs as valuable as they can be are a distraction I think for for in the reading process if you will if you have you know ten photographs stuck in what they refer to as a signature at the heart of a book to me it is like having a lighthouse in the fog you want to turn back to those those pages and that signature every time you come across a passage involving somebody you want to kind of find out about because of that because because I don't want a signature in the book because the marketing folk at publishing companies insist on photographs I've come to what I consider to be a happy medium and that is at the start of each major section of the book that is what I referred to as a part part 1 part 2 part 3 that's where you'll find a photograph and that photograph does work it's not just stuck in there it does work it tells you something about what's coming next in that part ideally propels you into it also you come across the photograph in the course of your reading it's not like you can find that photograph readily you can't thumb back to it you come to it you acknowledge it you see it you read it for what take the meaning of it and then you move on and then the next part similar thing happens and you you're propelled forward so that's that's my philosophy here's a photograph that's not in the book also of another one of her affairs torn Wilder yeah now flirting Wilder I don't think she had an affair with him I think even at this point he was he had pretty much declared his interest in another another directions they were very good friends they were very good friends in fact it actually carried a picture of him in a locket and what is remarkable though is that she managed to have these friendships which said with such potent literary figures in that time which also speaks to her her compelling character who else well Carl Sandburg but she also had Thomas Wolfe was that anatomists Woolf Thomas Wolfe of course a tough Thomas Wolfe her favorite house Woolf occurs pretty much after the action in the book 1933 four is when the book is centered he comes into the picture fairly late in the program but they had a really quite a hot and heavy affair actually and he was a frequent visitor to the embassy who knows who knows how she she was able to do it but they or two it was clearly a physical affair well I read that Leonardo DiCaprio is gonna play dr. Holmes from your book of devil in the White City which came out what was it about eight eight years ago it doesn't seem like that but yes yeah I mean that was the last time you're here and then as I read this book Martha stuck right out as a possible future movie yeah person who would play it Scarlett Johansson I don't know maybe you know or or now it's hard to speculate but it would be it I think it could make a very interesting movie actually I think it'd be a better miniseries frankly sort of a sort of a dark Upstairs Downstairs how many of your books have been made into movies none as yet but a lot of them have been optioned but none made into movies yet Isaac storm not Jeff how big a cellar was that compared to say devil in the White City it was a huge seller but double the White City pretty much dwarfed it in terms of sales did I read 2.3 million at least you know for devil in White City yeah and do you fight this as you write books that are do they all go back to this is not devil in the White City you mean do I do I have to deal with the pressure of having had a book like Havel the White City yeah yes yeah yeah and thank you for mentioning it what what kind of but but during that unusual position that no matter what book is sold you get something with it but but the thing is the thing is you know I having had successful books put you in a position where yes almost anything I proposed would be taken seriously but there's a danger there so really all the pressure is on me to to come up with a winning idea that I feel passion well passion is a is a strange word that I feel sufficiently compelling to spend the next four years or more with but also I have to be very much aware that there is an inclination to acquire whatever idea I put forward so the pressure is entirely on me to come up with something that I can live with in that in that time do I feel doing this is a daunting to try to feel like I have to do as well or better with the next book as I did with with the devil in the White City yes yes it's huge pressure let's go back to the book and show some more photographs and tell us who this man is right here yeah this is one of my favorite characters in the book this is this is Rudolph deals Rudolph yields who was the very first chief of the Gestapo Gestapo was formed in April of 1933 I have to emphasize first because deals lasted in that job for one year and was replaced by Himmler who brought in his protege Reinhard Heydrich and then the game changed completely they were as thoroughly evil as as as any human being could be Rudolph deals was he he to me really embodies the complexity and nuance of this period which is really the message of this book was how complex how complex this air was how hard to divine what was coming down the pike and how easy in other ways but how hard it seemed to really piece what the what the what the future was gonna be because of what was happening in 33 34 he embodies this complexity this is this sense of nuance because a he was not a member of the Nazi Party he was viewed by Dodd and by other diplomats in Berlin as one of the best men of the Nazi regime he was the man he went to if he wanted to extract a foreign national of yours from Dachau let's say which at this time by the way was a was not a camp for for Jews it was a camp for political opponents and deals deals was also a very he was a very romantic figure he's very handsome at least from the the cheekbones up from the cheekbones down as the photograph showed he was pretty heavily scarred and this was from a practice common among students of when he was a young man comment of young men of his generation called bear Blake dueling where they would fight with actual swords sharp swords the point being - so mark your opponent that you became the victor and everybody would be sewed up and presumably sent off to class I mean it was purely meant to demonstrate once once courage and once once manhood so here's deals horribly scarred from the cheekbones down very handsome though to women Martha was really taken with him obviously and they became involved in a what appears also to have been a a physical affair how early and their arrival over there 1933 you know the exact date you know when they when they first became an item if you will is is not known at least not can't extent that I could find but it was pretty obvious that by the fall of 1933 they were involved just to complicate things I don't think we found a picture of Bora you have Rudolph deals over here from the running Liga stop Oakland and then who's Boris and what's the relationship to yeah Boris is another one of the characters that I found I found very compelling Boris and Vinogradov when Martha meets him and this happens a little after she's become involved with with with Rudolph deals she by the way was not opposed to seeing numerous men at the same time she was really kind of far ahead of the her time I guess in that respect Boris was a top six for I think if I recall correctly six four very handsome Russian very charming she meets him he meets she meets him at a party and and as far as anybody can tell it seemed to be love at first sight for both of them they become involved in a very very important love affair for her one of the she would describe it later is one of the three great loves of her life when she becomes involved with Boris however she appears not to recognize something that that everybody else in Berlin seems to know and that is that that it's very likely that Boris is an operative or at least in in some way allied with the Soviet intelligence apparatus the NKVD precursor to the KGB and eventually this becomes a very important part of the story there's so many names and so many connections and all that when you went after this story where did you go did you go to Germany did you I mean we're placing like how did you how did you get yourself and you were a Russian major as I remember and Russian and Russian and Russian history yeah so you hadn't touched the German history part of this no no this is all this was all new to me well you know when you study history when you study European history you know some of it and in fact I was before I started this I was a victim well victims a strong word but I think I think most of us tend to view this period 1933 to 1945 as one homo gene this block of horror and Holocaust right and what really surprised me is how how many distinct phases and how things evolved from this 3334 period onward I was I just found that this education was to me terrifically interesting and I just I just went about it the way one would do anything of this guy you start at the outside you start with the tertiary works the great the great works of scholarship and let me say right here that that you know I wrote this book about this one very narrow but very important period through the eyes of these two Americans I am NOT a Hitler scholar I am NOT to go to a guy on the history of World War two and so forth but there are some some scholars who have written tremendous works mean Sir Ian Kershaw Richard Evans and some of the old classics Alan bollocks Hitler a study and tyranny shira's books berlin diary the rise and fall of the Third Reich and so forth you start with those and start kind of getting a feel for for the territory and start working in and and then you start looking at memoirs personal memoirs and things like that not just of my principles Dodd and Martha but of the people they knew and who knew them and who make references to them in their their works and then the fun stuff starts and that's when you go plunging into the archives like the Library of Congress the National Archives one real surprise to me was how valuable an archive in Madison Wisconsin became for me on this subject at the Wisconsin Historical Society archive on the campus of the University of Wisconsin I found there some wonderful materials about and by people who knew and were friends with the Dodds in Berlin and that kind of thing is absolutely invaluable when you get somebody else telling you about the key actors in your and your in your book and that was Madison Wisconsin of all places again you go back to 1933 connect all these dots you have dot in the American Embassy in Germany Hitler's the Chancellor but not the top dog your not the top dog yet pretty close to top dog but not totally back in the United States you have FDR in the White House and then yet the State Department what's the pretty good Club pretty good Club is a term that one diplomat Hugh Wilson the man actually who eventually replaced Dodd in Berlin he came up with to describe to describe the diplomatic corps the Foreign Service the nature of it that it was very this very club' attended the typical ambassador was very wealthy the Foreign Service senior guy was typically wealthy had gone to all the right schools Harvard Princeton so forth they all kind of came from the same world they knew each other many were many were independently wealthy most ambassadors in fact prior to Dodd were independently wealthy and there was this the club the idea extends even to the fact that if you weren't of that class of that character of person you were an outsider and Dodd was very much an outsider he did not go to those schools he did not have independent wealth and this became a serious source of initially low-grade and then later ultimately career-ending conflict within the State Department between the pretty good club and well you paint a picture of Dodd sitting in Germany relating to FDR who's his friend and to the State Department and State Department constantly undermining him as he tells FDR we got problems here well yeah what FDR's MO in terms of appointments was often to to make a direct appointment himself underneath without consulting much the person who was in charge of whatever department he was appointing somebody to so in the case in the State Department we had Secretary of State Cordell Hall but it was Roosevelt who appointed Dodd to be ambassador to Germany without consulting Hall without him having really much say at all so Dodd had this connection just direct connection to Rosa and Dodd would write handwritten letters to Roosevelt telling him the real situation in Germany and yet below that you had you had three senior guys in particular in the State Department whoo-hoo it's not so much that they they they weren't paying attention it's not so much that they they didn't accept what Dodd was telling the world well it was telling Roosevelt and them quietly it's almost as though they felt that that Germany was kind of a more an irritant than the important center it would become even in just a year's time so that was it was very it was ranged in the lines of conflict and and and force within the State Department visa v Dodd as it was I was really startled by that actually want to show some more photographs of Germans well known in this country Joseph Goebbels yeah yeah the head of the ministry of public enlightenment the propaganda chief of the Reich interestingly in 3334 grevilles was a coveted party guest there's a coveted guest at diplomatic functions because he had a great sense of humor and Orson was perceived to have a great sense of humor vicious sense of humor but I found that really intriguing startling actually could these did you could you learn in all this whether they could speak English you know I never tried to learn that they I believe some did speak English that Hitler never spoke English and made of the point of speaking a speaking German dad spoke German quite well Martha Martha halting but she learned quite a bit of German as she went along heinrich himmler next what about him what did by the way the these three in a row all committed suicide all was cyanide at the end of the war or somewhere in the process after the Nuremberg trials but mr. Hamlin yeah himmler former chicken farmer who became it became a senior police official in Munich had ambitions to to to run all the secret police operations throughout throughout Germany ultimately replaced deals as head of the Gestapo or I said of the the entire apparatus that included three staff well thoroughly thoroughly mundane human being thoroughly evil human being what evidence did dummy no this is silly question but whatever how did you find out how evil he was well history tells us that I mean during this period during this period the interesting thing is that you you would know one knew exactly how awful this guy was going to be so one has to be very careful I in my book Himmler plays a fairly fairly mild fairly minimal role only because he doesn't take province until after in Berlin until after let's say march of 1934 but you know Himmler the Gestapo after that the the role in the Holocaust I mean that's all known and obvious at this time however he was just considered to be sort of a rather rather mundane individual you know always the same kind of bland appearance looked like a schoolteacher more than a more than a you know then the this evil police agent chlorine on the screen yeah Goering was he was he was very large fat he was a former world war one flying ace yeah was said to have had tremendous courage the time the Dodds arrived Goering is considered one of the better men also of the regime that is to say at the it's more of a relative thing at that point relative to Hitler relative to Goebbels people could stand Goering much much more readily Dodd found him to be fairly reasonable rational at first although gurbles I mean Goering Goering was that seemed at heart to be kind of a flamboyant year old boy who happen to have a lot of power you know he was a very strange character there's a there's a charming moment I think when when mrs. Dodd Martha's mother is that a function at the Italian embassy it's a concert and there are all these little gilt chairs set out in the room for people to to sit in to listen to this concert Gary again is quite large sits in the chair directly in front of her and just absolutely overwhelmed the chair and she spent her time at that concert terrified that his chair would break and Gary would come collapsing into her lap this is kind of a kind of a nice little moment put see that's the way we pronounce it yeah Ernst Sedgwick humphs Dingle nicknamed very compelling character total surprise to me I had not known of his existence until until I started to work on this book he is he is at the PC he's a giant he's he's well over six feet tall he too weighs a lot but it's because he's just so tall an overwhelming personality he was also a very talented piano player talented in a sense he had a broad repertoire but he played with a certain kind of vehemence that may have probably meant that he wasn't all that you wouldn't want to hear a concert necessarily buy my but he he played the piano at night for for Hitler late at night was reputed to play late at night to kind of help Hitler calm his his nerves at the end of a long day and hit they would would listen to him play and perhaps even weep at times when by the passion that puts he was putting into the into the music one interesting note about is that his mother was American he was a Harvard Graduate himself but not a member of the pretty good club in any sense of the term what was the story about Martha and Hitler and the somebody attempted to when I was put see that was put see he had some some pretty wild ideas and at one point according to Martha's memoir puts he calls her up and he says you know I think I think that that Hitler would be a much better human being a much more moderate individual if he if he simply had a good woman in his life and he tells her in this phone call he says Martha you are that woman and then he arranges this very strange encounter at the Kaiser huff which is one of the places that Taylor like to hang out puts he orchestrates this meaning he has he has Martha and and himself sitting at one table Hitler comes in takes a seat at another table puts he arranges a meeting between the two of them Hitler kisses Martha's hand at least twice apparently during this encounter she sees him up close for the first time judges him to be a very ordinary seeming man with a certain boyish charm but what she's most struck by is as others have reported as well is his eyes they have this this almost hypnotic quality that she when they make contact nothing comes in the meeting obviously she does not have an affair with Hitler it's just that one moment and then it's over go back to the beginning in 33 did I remember that Martha was 24 Powell was her father as he died at this point was I believe 63 or 4 when they first arrived in 1933 how long does he live by the way in the very end he died in 1930 what is it 9 39 before before the war actually broke out and before America actually became involved in the war and he died actually of of a neurological problem that as best thing I can tell was made much worse by his his distress of his time in Berlin I know I'm jumping way ahead but there's a picture in the book of a golf course you know down here in Virginia and I guess you took it yeah I took it yeah I've traveled out there the stone laying which is the site of Dodds Dodds old farm Dodd was fancied himself a Jeffersonian Democrat to the core he believed in human farming values and and he owned this farm Round Hill Virginia that he just adored he loved spending time on this farm every summer he would go on and essentially pretend he was a farmer you know he ran it as as a working farm and then after his death at some point the family sold the property it became ironically this this quite quite nice Golf Course you point out Martha was married early yes yes for how long and what happened that marriage very brief marriage to to a to a New York banker and and I should note that she was married to this to this guy after breaking two previous engagements so at the age of 24 she has already been around the block numerous times I mean she had broken two engagements she'd had an affair with Carl Sandburg she had had other love affairs with other other younger younger men and she had gotten married to this New York banker and had kept this marriage a secret actually from her friends the only people who knew about this marriage were of course the husband and the family and the families involved but right there there's there's evidence that there was a problem to begin with and sure enough soon that soon that marriage began to fall apart divorce proceedings were instituted so by the time she arrived in Berlin at 24 she was in the midst of of a divorce it was probably because of because of that feeling even more free when she got there guys in Prague years and years later dies in Prague years and years later yeah very I think I think the story is actually a tragic one for both dodd and his daughter in Martha's case in Martha's case in the in this first year 1933-34 and again that's when most of the action in the book takes place she undergoes this change from loving the Nazi Revolution to feeling she should allow herself with Soviet intelligence and provide information to them against the Nazis by the way what was our relationship with the Soviet Union in 1933 at that point we had not yet at the start in 1933 we had not yet recognized the Soviet Union officially recognition followed soon after that we weren't exactly we weren't opponents we weren't necessarily the best of friends it was a fairly status quo kind of kind of relationship so Martha Martha can continued her alliance with Soviet intelligence as best anybody can tell she tended to be more talk than action at least that's that's my my appraisal and then when when the commie hunters started heating up their their activities in Congress they they called her to to testify and she and her husband a husband she married soon after arrival back in America alfred stern not one of the characters she knew in berlin they fled to Mexico and then ultimately wound up in Prague leading incidentally a very capitalist lifestyle with a brand-new Mercedes and a big house and so forth but but essentially self-exiled from America and and eventually realizing that that they eventually became very disillusioned with communism but we're stuck there in Prague but they were agents you know how do you define agent they they both Alfred's during her husband Adam work yeah they had they had an an alliance with Soviet intelligence they they were managed apparently by by case officers with the KGB but again what they actually did or what kind of intelligence they provided is is is not at all clear whether they they provided anything material in the way of intelligence is is is doubtful how old was she when she died gosh you're taxing my recollection of my own book but she was my memory I could probably write she's as old as 90 yeah I think she was 90 now she when did she write her memoir she wrote that in 1939 what impact did that have on to hold me because we hadn't gotten in the war yet well that's that's what makes the the memoir actually a very interesting piece of piece of piece of writing and because and a very very tricky piece of writing also I should I should know she wrote that in 1939 and it's got through embassy eyes and interestingly in that book she makes no reference to Boris they look about us because it was 1939 because she was afraid that if she talked about him he would be he would be harmed which ultimately was the case but not because not because of her well maybe not because of her but only by triangulation only by going through her papers do you find the materials necessary to show that oh yes this was Boris McGraw toff who occupied a good chunk of that of her romantic interest in that in that first year so anyway so 1939 was when she did the memoir the book was banned instantly in in Germany and I think it did actually reasonably well in America at least it got a lot of attention go back to Boris for a moment where I'm little confused is that she ended up working with the Soviets but didn't you point out in your book that when she made the trip to the Soviet Union I think that was from Germany from Germany here at his suggestion Boris his suggestion was he's still in Berlin Boris was Boris well Boris was still attached to Berlin but in fact during that trip that she takes to the Soviet Union he was actually in in Soviet Union as well but they made and this is where it gets kind of complicated Martha had told Boris apparently that she did not want to see him while she was in the Soviet Union because she didn't want to be influenced in her appraisal of what the Soviet Union was all about and later she actually raised a letter to Tabares that gets him very annoyed when she accuses him of she gets angry at for not having tried to connect with her in the Soviet Union he says he says well you know you didn't want to meet with me and he also he also hints that there was another reason he didn't see her and that's because of what he refers to as business and it may be well it seems pretty clear now based on intercepts and KGB documents that have been on earth not by me but by others now it seems quite clear that the Soviet intelligence that the handlers at Moscow Center wanted bars to stay away so that they could court so that the intelligence agency itself could court Martha and try to get her get her allegiance but she didn't I think I remember she didn't like what she saw she didn't like what she saw in the Soviet Union she found it a very drab depressing place but apparently was able to overcome that at least in terms of her her ideological allegiances but yes she was she was really really kind of dismayed by by what she saw experience did you ever get a sense of why she had these ideological leanings the sets that I got in the sense that she conveys in some of her writings and her papers is that it was mainly wasn't so much that she was in love with the Soviet Union of our communism it was that she was really deeply opposed to the Nazis and the Nazi regime by the time this first year comes to an end and that's what seems to have tipped her into the Soviet camp why she stayed in the Soviet camp it's it's very hard to say but it's clear that it's clear that she did continue her Allegiance your book has been on the New York Times top 5 for what a couple months now I think so yeah yeah most of my relief your relief why I sometimes think back and I think I wondered to myself how I dared do a book about about the Nazis and the Third Reich it's not like there aren't enough books out there already you know that it is one of the most heavily heavily written about subjects maybe only equalled by the Civil War you know and what made me think that I could leap in there and maybe say something new about one part of it I don't know but I am so relieved that at that audiences seem to seem to get it you know they seem to appreciate that this is this is a different kind of look at that era through very different perspective and it seems to have seems to have caught on you know you're one of those authors that everybody looks forward to those books to say we got another one of those stories how did you know by the way how well did thunderstruck do thunderstruck did well and they hit the New York Times bestseller lists and well paper and hard didn't do as well anywhere near as well as devil no way at City but I mean I think it I think it did fine and actually I still hear from it was more of a guidebook I think I mean I still hear from hear from a lot of when I take I was taking this book around the country on a book tour I would always hear from I was very glad to hear it I always have people men typically come out that's amazing huh thunderstruck was my favorite of your books and it was about what thunderstruck was about it was two to two converging narratives and a lot of people actually have confused have served I think have kind of criticized me for trying to do what I didn't devil in the White City with to to disparate narratives coming together but in fact the thunderstruck thing came about completely by accident and it is in fact two narratives one about Marconi in the inventive wireless the other about Hawley Harvey Crippen probably the second most famous murderer in English history although he killed only one person and it's about how Wireless led to this this amazing to me amazing chase across the Atlantic with the whole world watching this chase but Crippen the target of the chase being completely unaware because of the miracle of wireless all these messages were going out the world was following the chase he went about his business in disguise on this ship as if nothing were happening now you'd have Twitter's he'd have Twitter yeah you live in Seattle married to a doctor she still is practicing still practicing yeah she is a she's a neonatologist intensive care for New World he's and she sort of runs a little Empire there in Seattle you have three daughters pretty daughter where are they they become very expensive daughters one is a two one has just finished finished college and is now in graduate school actually here now in Washington another is at the University of Chicago interestingly living not far from where dad lived when he was there and then the third is going through pre-college angst with SATs and a CTS and she's a junior in high school let's go through the quick biography you were born where I was born as was half the world in Brooklyn New York went to college where went to college University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and you got the jacob master's degree not there I took a year off I was just gonna work for a while in publishing and and my goal was to save enough money to travel around the world and travel actually just around Europe and then I made a mistake of seeing all the president's men and decided I had to go to journalism school and went to Columbia which is where I got my masters and how many different newspapers first newspaper was a terrific experience the Bucks County courier times in Bucks County Pennsylvania just outside Philadelphia got extremely lucky went to The Wall Street Journal initially to the bureau that was based in Philadelphia there's no longer a bureau there but that was the biggest break of my my career that was a fantastic fantastic thing for me and then after that after that kind of you know I got married and did some freelance stuff for a while went back to the journal for a while worked for Time magazine for a bit but mostly during that period longer and longer things and eventually a natural transition to two books one of the threads in your book is about the German hatred for the Jews and that's obviously been written about many many times what did you what did you decide after reading all that you read what was their hatred based on what was the hatred based on you know I don't know I don't know I don't think anybody knows I don't think anybody can ever really can really understand what what drives somebody to hate a particular particular race what I was startled by though and and and and and intrigued by is thisis put forward by by Sir Ian Kershaw about about anti-semitism in Germany and it is his contention that that for the average German the question of anti-semitism the Jewish Question the Jewish problem whatever you want to refer to it as was very much an abstract thing that for the average German the German in the countryside it was just it was not really hatred of Jews was not something that was really high on their on their on their platform because there were relatively few Jews in Germany there were very few Jews in Germany and most of these Jews most lived in the big cities in Berlin and Munich and so forth so the average German average guy in a small town Germany had very little contact with Jews so any kind of anti-semitic attitude was very much an abstract that was not the case as mr. Shaw points out among members of the Nazi Party among the stormtroopers a self-selecting group who loved Jews for whom anti-semitism for whom hatred of Jews was one of the key reasons to to be in this in this movement any sense of what was it a device for them to get everybody all stirred up if there weren't that many it was a device it seemed to be a device but again a curiosities this is so interesting because it suggests that it suggests that if it were a device it had limited impact in terms of the broad German population but a lot of power in terms of those who were already thinking in those directions among the stormtroopers and and so forth you did something that you don't often see in a book and that is you quoted directly Sir Ian Kershaw I don't know I three four times in there I mean most times it's in a footnote or back in the back why did you do that and and tell us a little more about him yeah you know I did that because he is the man you know he is he is he is I would argue of course now other scholars will condemn me for this but I would argue he is the the Hitler scholar and when you have someone someone like that I think you need to acknowledge as clearly and upfront as you can and because also some of the things that you found there's just so fascinating no I mean one of his books he notes that Hitler's favorite movie was King Kong you know that's lovely stuff that's the kind of little detail that I just love we are almost out of time but I have to ask you about this fascination you have with little statues the little things you put in hotel room are you referring to the windowsill wars I am yes we're in the world of that country you know oh yes I seen one of them right there this is after the wars are over by the way when the characters have dispersed and the these little characters by the way come from from red rose tea boxes those of you out there who drink red rose tea will know exactly what I'm talking about and one day after this is what happens when you when you start a website you know one day I was just this is after Christmas and I'd gotten a new windowsill toy and I started thinking to myself you know what if this new windowsill toy I have a lot of these things on my windowsill you know from nones Hill is to wind up things and serpent pens and so forth so what if the addition of this character to this windowsill caused a conflict that led to a battle among all the toys in the house so I just decided to follow that thread in installments on my website and you know what it kind of went viral among my my daughter daughters and their friends and that became sort of for me almost like almost like doing a cartoon for me and was really the life will kind of break and anybody wants to get into all this can go to Eric Larsen book looks calm right before we close down in the garden of beasts comes from what what's that title for the title this book the title had to be that because so much of the action in the book takes place around the the main park in Berlin it did there there is still a park there today it's very different obviously because the park was leveled by the Russian assault in 1949 45 but it's the tear garden which is in literal translation the garden of beasts and all the action in the book takes place in this this pretty narrowly narrowly defined arc around the edge of the park final question of all the characters you wrote about besides Martha and all that which character which German character would you want to know more about just because of what you learn deals Rudolf deals the the first chief of the Gestapo I find myself just absolutely fascinated by him and fascinated by the fact that that that he survived the war and afterwards testified on behalf of the prosecution against the war criminals Eric Larsen we thank you for your time thank you for a DVD copy of this program call one eight seven seven six six to seven seven to six for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program visit us at Q&A or QA programs are also available as c-span podcasts

Channel: C-SPAN

Views: 21,444

Rating: 4.6799998 out of 5

Keywords: qa, C-SPAN, cspan, erik, larson, nazis, germany, 1933

Id: 7BpIhriaujw

Length: 59min 33sec (3573 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 26 2011