In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

manners.”

After the fourth course, when she could resist no longer, she looked at Papen and, deploying what she described as “the most naive sounding tones” she could muster, said, “Mr. Chancellor, there is something in the Memoirs of President von Hindenburg which I am sure you can elucidate for me.”

Papen gave her his attention. His eyebrows were flared upward at the ends like feathers and imparted to his gaze the cold focus of a raptor.

Schultz kept her expression cherubic and continued: “He complains that in the last war, in 1917, the German High Command never heard anything about the peace suggestions of President Wilson and that if he had known about them the dangerous submarine campaign would not have been launched. How was that possible?”

Despite the quiet of her voice, suddenly everyone at the table within eavesdropping distance became silent and intent. Dodd watched Papen; State Secretary Bulow leaned in toward the conversation with what Schultz described as “a gleam of wicked amusement in his eyes.”

Papen said brusquely, “There never was such a thing as a peace suggestion by President Wilson.”

A very foolish thing to say, Schultz knew, given the presence of Ambassador Dodd, an expert on Wilson and the period in question.

Quietly but firmly, his voice bearing the lingual mists of North Carolina—“every bit the Southern gentleman,” Schultz recalled—Dodd looked at Papen and said, “Oh yes there was.” And gave the precise date.

Schultz was delighted. “Papen’s long horsey teeth grew longer,” she wrote. “He did not even try to emulate the quiet tone of Ambassador Dodd.”

Instead, Papen “just snarled” his reply: “I never understood anyhow why America and Germany got to grips in that war.” He looked at the faces around him “triumphantly proud of the arrogance of his tone,” Schultz wrote.

In the next instant Dodd won Shultz’s “undying admiration and gratitude.”

MEANWHILE, AT ANOTHER TABLE, Bella Fromm experienced an anxiety unrelated to the conversations around her. She had come to the ball because it was always great fun and very useful for her column on Berlin’s diplomatic community, but this year she arrived suppressing a deep uneasiness. Though she was enjoying herself, at odd moments her mind returned to her best friend, Wera von Huhn, also a prominent columnist, whom most everyone knew by her nickname, “Poulette,” French for “young hen,” derived from her last name, Huhn, which in German means “chicken.”

Ten days earlier, Fromm and Poulette had gone for a drive through the Grunewald, an eleven-thousand-acre forest preserve west of Berlin. Like the Tiergarten, it had become a haven for diplomats and others seeking respite from Nazi surveillance. The act of driving in the forest provided Fromm one of the few moments when she felt truly safe. “The louder the motor,” she wrote in her diary, “the more I feel at ease.”

There was nothing carefree about this latest drive, however. Their conversation centered on the law passed the preceding month that barred Jews from editing and writing for German newspapers and required members of the domestic press to present documentation from civil and church records to prove they were “Aryan.” Certain Jews could retain their jobs, namely those who had fought in the past war or lost a son in battle or who wrote for Jewish newspapers, but only a small number qualified for these exemptions. Any unregistered journalist caught writing or editing faced up to one year in prison. The deadline was January 1, 1934.

Poulette sounded deeply troubled. Fromm found this perplexing. She herself knew about the requirement, of course. Being Jewish, she had resigned herself to the fact that she would be out of a job by the new year. But Poulette? “Why should you worry?” Fromm asked.

“I have reason, Bella darling. I wrote for my papers, chased all over the place getting them. Finally I found out that my grandmother was Jewish.”

With that news her life had been abruptly, irrevocably altered. Come January she would join a wholly new social stratum consisting of thousands of people stunned to learn they had Jewish relatives somewhere in their past. Automatically, no matter how thoroughly they had identified themselves as Germans, they became reclassified as non-Aryan and found themselves consigned to new and meager lives on the margins of the Aryans-only world being constructed by Hitler’s government.

“Nobody knew anything about it,” Poulette told Fromm. “Now I lose my living.”

By itself the discovery was bad enough, but it also coincided with the anniversary of the death of Poulette’s husband. To Fromm’s surprise, Poulette decided not to attend the Little Press Ball; she was feeling too sad to go.

Fromm hated to leave her alone that night but went to the ball all the same after resolving that the next day she would visit Poulette and bring her back to her house, where Poulette loved to play with Fromm’s dogs.

Throughout the evening, in the moments when her mind wasn’t engaged by the antics of those around her, Fromm found herself haunted by thoughts of her friend’s uncharacteristic depression.

TO DODD, PAPEN’S REMARK ranked as one of the most idiotic he had heard since his arrival in Berlin. And he had heard many. An odd kind of fanciful thinking seemed to have bedazzled Germany, to the highest levels of government. Earlier in the year, for example, Goring had claimed with utter sobriety that three hundred German Americans had been murdered in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia at the start of the past world war. Messersmith, in a dispatch, observed that even smart, well-traveled Germans will “sit and calmly tell you the most extraordinary fairy tales.”

Now here was the nation’s vice-chancellor claiming not to understand why the United States had entered the world war against Germany.

Dodd looked at Papen. “I can tell you that,” he said, his voice just as level and even as before. “It was through the sheer, consummate stupidity of German diplomats.”

Papen looked stunned. His wife, according to Sigrid Schultz, looked strangely pleased. A new silence filled the table—not one of anticipation, as before, but a charged emptiness—until suddenly everyone sought to fill the chasm with flecks of diverting conversation.

In another world, another context, it would have been a minor incident, a burst of caustic banter readily forgotten. Amid the oppression and Gleichschaltung of Nazi Germany, however, it was something far more important and symbolic. After the ball, as had become custom, a core group of guests retired to Schultz’s flat, where her mother had prepared piles of sandwiches and where the story of Dodd’s verbal swordplay was recounted with great and no doubt drunken flourish. Dodd himself was not present, inclined as he was to leave banquets as early as protocol allowed and head for home to close out the night with a glass of milk, a bowl of stewed peaches, and the comfort of a good book.

DESPITE HER MOMENTS of upwelling anxiety, Bella Fromm found the ball delightful. Such a pleasure to see how Nazis behaved after a few drinks 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 she described 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