Never too Late to Read Classics discussion

For June we are reading In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson. Larson is popularly known for his narrative nonfiction books, and this one won the Washington State Book Award for History/General Nonfiction (2012). This summer venture off into 1933 Germany at the beginning of the Third Reich and the events that led to WWII.

From GR:
The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.

A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the New Germany, she has one affair after another, including with the surprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler's true character and ruthless ambition.

Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Goring and the expectedly charming—yet wholly sinister—Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror.

Yes, charming yet sinister, that's a worrying sign.

I read this a few years ago and learned some histoy about those times. However, the sections about the American family were more like gossip magazines than history. The book was a mixed bag.

I read this book back in 2021. In the book. Larson makes some interesting references to two German authors this Group is reading this year: Hans Fallada and Thomas Mann. The following is a compilation of three posts on the subject I had made in this group's Hans Fallada thread and had also posted a link to in the NTLTRC's current German Read:

"I've been reading In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson, the story of Professor William E. Dodd America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany. Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha., who was also friend or lover to Carl Sandburg and Thornton Wilder.
Martha parties with all and has affairs with both Nazis and Russian Communists but in the section I read today, she has a revelation when visiting Hans Fallada, who stayed in Germany when others like the Mann brothers left. An internet article explains that Martha:

"finally got the message when she and a dissident friend paid a visit to the author Hans Fallada, who had supposedly come to some sort of accommodation with the Nazis. "I saw the stamp of naked fear on a writer's face for the first time," she recalled, "

The Larson book has Fallada explaining that he ran the ending of his then current novel by Nazi authorities first. It was interesting reading about Fallada writing during the Nazi regime and Thomas Mann's statement that novels written in such a manner should be ignored.

This is the exact Thomas Mann quote contained in the book:

"It may be superstitious belief, but in my eyes, any books that could have been printed at all in Germany between 1933 and 1945 are worse than worthless and not objects one wishes to touch. A stench of blood and shame attached to them. They should all be pulped."

But to understand Mann's statement, the book's previous paragraph described Fallada's compromising as follows:

"Fallada made more and more concessions eventually allowing Goebbels to script the ending of his novel Iron Gustav, (Iron Gustav: A Berlin Family Chronicle) which depicted the hardships of life during the past world war. Fallada saw this as a prudent concession. "I do not like grand gestures," he wrote; "being slaughtered before the tyrant's throne, senselessly, to the benefit of no one and to the detriment of my children, that is not my way."

He recognized that his various capitulations took a toll on his writing, He wrote . . . "I cannot act as I want to - if I want to stay alive. And so a fool gives less than he has."

I would note that Fallada wrote Little Man, What Now? before the Nazi's started overseeing book publishing. His other famous book Alone in Berlin aka in USA as Every Man Dies Alone was published in 1947, 2 years after the end of WWII. So no capitulations were made when writing those 2 novels.

Writer capitulations were also made in the Soviet Union, as with Vasily Grossman's Stalingrad, the predecessor to his Life and Fate. Important novels can still be written under these constraints."

It's easy for some people to criticize authors who make compromises. But how would they behave in those circumstances?
I've read a couple of non-fiction books by Fallada which talk about his family life, and it's obvious how important they are to him.

A certain female French author of the mid twentieth century doesn't have a pristine record in regards to collaborating, but it generally is not mentioned at all. And she wasn't the only one.