Erik Larson - In the Garden of Beasts

When the Harnacks traveled, Mildred sent Martha postcards upon which she wrote poetic observations of the scenery before her and warm expressions of affection. On one card Mildred wrote, “Martha, you know that I love you and think of you through it all.” She thanked Martha for reading and critiquing some of her writing. “It shows a gift in you,” she wrote.

She closed with an inked sigh: “Oh my Dear, my Dear… life—” The ellipsis was hers.

To Martha these cards were like petals falling from an unseen place. “I prized these post-cards and short letters with their delicate, almost tremblingly sensitive prose. There was nothing studied or affected about them. Their feeling sprang simply from her full and joyous heart and had to be expressed.”

Mildred became a regular guest at embassy functions, and by November she was earning extra pay typing the manuscript of the first volume of Dodd’s Old South . Martha, in turn, became a regular attendee at a new salon that Mildred and Arvid established, the Berlin equivalent of the Friday Niters. Ever the organizers, they accumulated a society of loyal friends—writers, editors, artists, intellectuals—who convened at their apartment several times a month for weekday suppers and Saturday-afternoon teas. Here, Martha noted in a letter to Wilder, she met the writer Ernst von Salomon, notorious for having played a role in the 1922 assassination of Weimar foreign minister Walter Rathenau. She loved the cozy atmosphere Mildred conjured, despite having little money to spare. There were lamps, candles and flowers, and a tray of thin bread, cheese, liverwurst, and sliced tomatoes. Not a banquet, but enough. Her host, Martha told Wilder, was “the kind of person who has the sense or nonsense to put a candle behind a bunch of pussy willows or alpen rosen.”

The talk was bright, smart, and daring. Too daring at times, at least in the view of Salomon’s wife, whose perspective was shaped partly by the fact she was Jewish. She was appalled at how casually the guests would call Himmler and Hitler “utter fools” in her presence, without knowing who she was or where her sympathies lay. She watched one guest pass a yellow envelope to another and then wink like an uncle slipping a piece of forbidden candy to a nephew. “And there I sit on the sofa,” she said, “and can hardly breathe.”

Martha found it thrilling and gratifying, despite the group’s anti-Nazi bent. She staunchly defended the Nazi revolution as offering the best way out of the chaos that had engulfed Germany ever since the past war. Her participation in the salon reinforced her sense of herself as a writer and intellectual. In addition to attending the correspondents’ Stammtisch at Die Taverne, she began spending a lot of time in the great old Berlin cafés, those still not fully “coordinated,” such as the Josty on Potsdamer Platz and the Romanisches on the Kurfürstendamm. The latter, which could seat up to a thousand people, had a storied past as a haven for the likes of Erich Maria Remarque, Joseph Roth, and Billy Wilder, though all by now had been driven from Berlin. She went out to dinner often and to nightclubs like Ciro’s and the Eden roof. Ambassador Dodd’s papers are silent on the matter, but given his frugality he must have found Martha to be an unexpectedly, and alarmingly, costly presence on the family ledger.

Martha hoped to stake a place in Berlin’s cultural landscape all her own, not just by dint of her friendship with the Harnacks, and she wanted that place to be a prominent one. She brought Salomon to one staid U.S. embassy function, clearly hoping to cause a stir. She succeeded. In a letter to Wilder she exulted in the crowd’s reaction as Salomon appeared: “the astonishment (there was a little hushed gasping and whispering behind hands from the oh so proper gathering)… Ernst von Salomon! accomplice in the Rathenau murder…”

She coveted attention and got it. Salomon described the guests gathered at one U.S. embassy party—possibly the same one—as “the capital’s jeunesse dorée, smart young men with perfect manners… smiling attractively or laughing gaily at Martha Dodd’s witty sallies.”

She grew bolder. The time had come, she knew, to start throwing some parties of her own.

MEANWHILE DIELS, STILL ABROAD and living well at a swank hotel in Carlsbad, began putting out feelers to gauge the mood back in Berlin, whether it was safe yet for him to return; for that matter, whether it would ever be safe.

Martha grew increasingly confident about her social appeal, enough so that she organized her own afternoon salon, modeled on the teas and evening discussion groups of her friend Mildred Fish Harnack. She also threw herself a birthday party. Both events unfolded in ways markedly different from what she had hoped for.

In selecting guests for her salon she used her own contacts as well as Mildred’s. She invited several dozen poets, writers, and editors, for the ostensible purpose of meeting a visiting American publisher. Martha hoped “to hear amusing conversation, some exchange of stimulating views, at least conversation on a higher plane than one is accustomed to in diplomatic society.” But the guests brought an unexpected companion.

Instead of forming a lively and vibrant company with her at its center, the crowd became atomized, small groups here and there. A poet sat in the library with several guests clustered near. Others gathered tightly around the guest of honor, exhibiting what Martha termed “a pathetic eagerness to know what was happening in America.” Her Jewish guests looked especially ill at ease. The talk lagged; the consumption of food and alcohol surged. “The rest of the guests were standing around drinking heavily and devouring plates of food,” Martha wrote. “Probably many of them were poor and actually ill-fed, and the others were nervous and anxious to conceal it.”

In all, Martha wrote, “it was a dull and, at the same time, tense afternoon.” The uninvited guest was fear, and it haunted the gathering. The crowd, she wrote, was “so full of frustration and misery… of tension, broken spirits, doomed courage or tragic and hated cowardice, that I vowed never to have such a group again in my house.”

Instead she resigned herself to helping the Harnacks with their regular soirees and teas. They did have a gift for gathering loyal and compelling friends and holding them close. The idea that one day it would kill them would have seemed at the time, to Martha, utterly laughable.

THE GUEST LIST for her birthday party, set for October 8, her actual birth date, included a princess, a prince, several of her correspondent friends, and various officers of the SA and SS, “young, heel-clicking, courteous almost to the point of absurdity.” Whether Boris Winogradov attended is unclear, though by now Martha was seeing him “regularly.” It’s possible, even likely, that she didn’t invite him, for the United States still had not recognized the Soviet Union.

Two prominent Nazi officials made appearances at the party. One was Putzi Hanfstaengl, the other Hans Thomsen, a young man who served as liaison between the Foreign Ministry and Hitler’s chancellery. He had never exhibited the overheated swoon so evident in other Nazi zealots, and as a consequence he was well liked by members of the diplomatic corps and a frequent visitor to the Dodds’ home. Martha’s father often spoke with him in terms more blunt than diplomatic protocol allowed, confident that Thomsen would relay his views to senior Nazi officials, possibly even to Hitler himself. At times Martha had the impression that Thomsen might harbor personal reservations about Hitler. She and Dodd called him “Tommy.”