15 Sep 2019

The Unusual Attractions of Martha Dodd

by | posted in: WWII, WWII: European Theater | 0

Martha Dodd.

She was not a journalist stationed in Berlin. She did not report on the heady news from a Nazifying Germany (though she had had a brief stint with the Chicago Tribune). She was no diplomat. She did not conduct official business with the militarizing German state (though her father, as U. S. ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937, did). She had no official, paid position at all. Yet the bestselling author Erik Larson built an entire book around her.

Exaggeration? It is true that roughly half of the source material came from her father. Without William Dodd, Martha never gets to Berlin. Without her father, Martha has no access to Nazi muckamucks: no inside story, no dangerous liaisons.

Larson called his 2011 book In the Garden of the Beasts, after the illustrious Berlin park, the Tiergarten, against which the embassy abutted. He (or his publisher) added the subtitle, “Love, Terror, and an American family in Hitler’s Berlin.” Said family included Ambassador Dodd’s son Bill and wife, Mattie. But son and wife are bit players, cited only occasionally in the nearly-400-page text. They are average Americans implied in the subtitle, foils to righteous, scholarly William and flamboyant, literary Martha.

The family‘s story is, to all intents and purposes, the ambassador’s and his daughter’s. Larson employs Dodd’s letters, private papers, official documents, and a published diary (which Martha helped edit)–as well as the views of the (mostly) men he dealt with–to tell the story that happened center stage, as it were. Martha’s extensive correspondence and a published memoir–as well as writings of the many men and women with whom she interacted–allow Larson to draw back the curtain and reveal the titillating, intrigue-filled underside of prewar Berlin. I was struck by how much this book depended on Martha.

It is through Martha that we first experience the shock of Nazi brutality run amok. On a visit to Nuremburg with friends, Martha sees a mob of SA stormtroopers, dragging, taunting, hazing a powerless woman through the streets. It is a scene straight out of a medieval witch craze. The woman’s head is shaved bald; her face powdered to “the color of diluted absinthe,” in Martha’s words; around her neck, a placard proclaiming her offense, “I HAVE OFFERED MYSELF TO A JEW.” [GB 96-97] We see the scales fall from the sheltered American’s eyes. She will never look upon Germany–or the world–in the same way again.

But Martha was not as sheltered as she let on. She was, in fact, a married woman of twenty-five, though her elopement had never been made public. Nor was it legally ended when she left to follow her father to Germany. Martha “rather enjoyed being treated like a maiden of eighteen knowing all the while my dark secret.” [GB 113] Larson puts it more directly: “Outwardly she looked the part of a young American virgin, but she knew sex and liked it, and especially liked the effect when the man learned the truth.” [GB 113]

So, through Martha we take rides into the countryside with Nazi officials, dance beside them in night clubs, and imagine what went on behind closed doors when they returned home. The liberal-minded (or willfully-blind, depending on your perspective) ambassador gave his daughter free rein to come and go as she pleased. At the embassy, male callers paid her visits at all hours. Fritz, the embassy butler, kvetched, “That was not a house but a house of ill repute.” [GB 115]

Of all her liaisons, the longest lasting and “most important of all,” [GB 120] according to Larson, was with Soviet embassy official, Boris Vinogradov, actually an agent with the NKVD, precursor to the KGB. Fascism and communism were locked in conflict in 1930s Europe (Democracy was struggling to get up off the mat after a knockout blow.) It was not difficult for Boris to turn Martha’s growing hatred of Fascism into support for the Soviet communist experiment. In short, we watch Martha become a fellow traveler, right under her father’s nose.

She goes so far as to take a — month tour through Soviet Russia and Georgia, accompanied only by a middle-aged Russian interpreter. Her report on the trip is layered with ambivalence yet, we learn from Larson, she was ultimately drawn to support the communist experiment.

That is, she “spied” for the Soviet Union for several years, both while in Germany and, after 1937, in the United the United States. (The actuality of “spying” was often much more prosaic than the term implies. It is unlikely “Liza,” her code name, passed on an information of much use to the Soviets.) A resurgent HUAC in 1953 forced Martha and her fellow-traveler American husband, Alfred Stern, into exile: first in Mexico, then in Czechoslovakia. Martha lived long enough to see Soviet tanks ride through Prague streets in 1968 and live another two decades under Soviet domination. She lived long enough to witness the Velvet Revolution, ending communist rule in Czechoslovakia, but not long enough to ever again set foot on the land of her birth.

Martha Dodd was an intriguing personality. As I said at the top of this post, she seemed to me the raison d’etre for Larson’s entire project.

So, I went to the source. Two sources, in fact.

Martha Dodd published a memoir, Through Embassy Eyes, in 1940, shortly after returning to the United States, and a novel, Sowing the Wind, as the war was coming to an end, in 1945. The latter was “clearly based on the  life of one of her past lovers, Ernst Udet” and described “how Nazism seduced and degraded a good-hearted World War I flying ace.” [GB 359] I was curious for several reasons. What was the extent of Dodd’s relationship with Udet, the wartime enemy and postwar friend of Eddie Rickenbacker? What light did it shed on the tragedy of the historical Udet? What kind of fiction did Dodd write? I used SearchOhio and OhioLink to locate a copy. There was, as far as I could tell, exactly one copy of the novel in the state of Ohio. I ordered it.

I didn’t plan to read more than a few chapters. I just wanted to get a sense. The writing in the first few pages was overwrought, not the stuff of a skilled novelist. I forced myself over three nights of sleepy, in-bed reading through the first two chapters. I moved it to daytime reading and, to my surprise, kept reading. I was reading Dodd’s novel exactly as one is supposed to read fiction: “in one sitting,” to “find out what happens.” I almost went ahead and read it in one day (not counting the fits and starts of the first two chapters).

I cannot say that Dodd’s writing created the illusion of a real fictional world, that it magically captured my imagination. No, I was compelled as a historical reader by her insider’s access to momentous historical people and events. Attempting to distinguish the fact from the fiction is my preferred mode of inquiry when reading historical fiction. Dodd’s characters were a little flat, but the full-size, historical figures behind them gave them added interest.

I went to her other source: her memoir, Through Embassy Eyes, from which Larson drew extensively. In his bibliographical note, Larson was sure to point out that the work is not “wholly trustworthy” and “must be treated with care.” He added that it “is necessarily her own rendering of people and events…and as such is indispensable as a window into her thoughts and feelings….” [GB 370] Those last three words are the crux of the matter: what did it feel like to witness Germany descend into Nazi insanity. Martha was perhaps too close to said “people and events” to be “wholly trustworthy,” yet the very closeness makes her view so valuable–if not “indispensable.”

Erik Larson could have written his book with just the input of Ambassador William Dodd and his official and social contacts. He could have, but he wouldn’t have. It’s hard to think that he would have bothered. Martha’s input gave his book spice and piquancy; sex and intrigue. There’s more to Martha’s input and her life story. Revisit this space next week for more on this fascinating figure and her writing.

Sources:

8 Aug 2019

“Bomb” Is a Big Story

by | posted in: Good Reads: Nonfiction, WWII, WWII: Pacific Theater | 0

“This is a big story,” says Steve Sheinkin at the start of Bomb: A Race to Build–and Steal–the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon (Roaring Brook Press, 2012). Indeed.

 

For those, like me, who came of age in the late seventies and early eighties, when Olympic rivalries with the Soviet Union were fraught events and nightly international news items were tinged with Cold War confrontation, but who were too young to understand the origin of those fears and whose historical education, when it didn’t stop in June at the Second World War, by necessity smoothed over thorny details, Sheinkin’s big story provided long overdue answers to gnawing questions, stated and otherwise; to wit: Whence came the anti-communist paranoia that fueled the McCarthy era? The short answer: Fuchs, Gold, Hall, and, yes, the Rosenbergs. The longer answer: Read Sheinkin’s book.

 

It is not a book solely about espionage, though the subtitle accurately indicates its prominence as more than just a subplot. It is also a book about the science of the atomic bomb (and the scientists who made it), a book about heroic action in the face of tyranny (as well as cowardly and ethically questionable behavior).

 

First, the Science:

 

Sheinkin writes, “Sherber drew a rough sketch of what became known as the ‘gun assembly’ method. Surrounding the uranium would be a tamper–a shield of very dense metal. The tamper would prevent flying neutrons from escaping, bouncing instead back into the uranium. This would cause more fission, and a bigger explosion.” A simple diagram accompanies Sheinkin’s words. Even I understood the process. Mostly.

 

With limited uranium, the team turned to devising a plutonium bomb: “Since firing two pieces of plutonium together inside a gun was too slow, the only solution…was to blast the pieces of plutonium together with explosives–a process known as ‘implosion.’ Basically the idea was to take several pieces of plutonium, about the size of a grapefruit all together. Explosives would be arranged around the plutonium, like a very thick skin around a fruit. The explosives would blast the plutonium together at a tremendous speed, creating a critical mass and setting off a chain reaction–an atomic explosion.” Sheinkin explains complicated phenomena well.

 

The Scientists:

 

Robert J. Oppenheimer: Rail-thin, chain-smoking, a walking bundle of nerves, the director of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos was key to its ultimate success. Enrico Fermi: His ability to induce a fission chain reaction gave the Americans the edge in the development of a bomb. George Kistiakowsky: A chemist, Kisty was assigned the most difficult task of creating a perfectly symmetrical implosion for the plutonium bomb. Richard Feynman: The twenty-six-year-old Princeton wunderkind kept the team on its toes with both his brilliance and his practical jokes.

 

The Heroes:

 

Knut Haukelid and his Operation Gunnerside team were able to drop into occupied Norway, descend a ravine, scale a cliff, penetrate a heavy water manufacturing plant, and blow up its equipment. Before leaving on the mission, they were reminded of the fate of two that preceded them: a total of thirty-four British agents had been killed. “You have a fifty-fifty chance of doing the job, and only a fair chance of escaping,” they were told. Each was issued a cyanide pill in the event of capture. What kind of a man can proceed in such an action? One driven by love of country, yes, but perhaps even more by hatred of a malevolent invader. The eight accomplished their mission, setting the Nazis back significantly in their quest for the bomb, and escaped with their lives.

 

The Spies:

 

How does one make a decision to betray one’s country? It’s not quite the right question. These men and women (there were plenty of the latter) did not wish to bring about the destruction of the United States. They did not wish to see, necessarily, the triumph of the Soviet Union. They seemed, in general, to want to give the USSR a leg up. They seemed to have a historical sense that communism–social and economic equality–was the wave of the future. But their motivations were varied and unique to each.

 

Klaus Fuchs had been a Communist in Germany and paid for it with beatings at the hands of Nazis. After escaping to Britain, he was recruited to work on the development of an atomic bomb. He began passing on information to the Soviets through another German-born Communist, Ruth Werner. His information didn’t amount to much until he was recruited to join the Manhattan project in Los Alamos. Fuchs was the first spy to be nailed by counter-intelligence agents after the war.

 

Harry Gold became a Soviet agent because he needed a job during the Depression. Out of an odd sense of obligation to the man who found him work, Gold began funneling information from his chemical plant to a Soviet handler. A few years later, Gold thought his debt was paid and wanted out. He discovered that choice was no longer his to make. Not if he didn’t want his handlers to rat him out to his employer and get sent up the river. He was stuck with another ten years of double life and constantly watching his back

 

At eighteen, Ted Hall was the youngest member of the Manhattan Project team and “a natural-born rebel,” according to one of his Los Alamos colleagues. But he didn’t spy for the Soviets out of rebellion. “It seemed to me,” he said, “that an American monopoly was dangerous and should be prevented.” In other words, he anticipated the need for deterrence in a post-nuclear world. “My decision about contacting the Soviets was a gradual one, and it was entirely my own.” But it is also true that the seed of the idea was planted by his roommate, “dedicated Communist” Saville Sax.

 

The Rosenbergs don’t feature in this book, but Sheinkin explains how an eleventh hour act of desperation, in which Soviet handlers breached normal espionage protocol, led to the pair’s downfall. Gold’s assignment in New Mexico in June 1945 “cross-contaminated” two separate spy rings, leading to the exposure of the second after his interrogation in 1950.

 

American agents of the Soviet Union really had been (almost) as common crows. More common, at least, than one would have imagined. Paranoia in the 1950s, while irrational both by definition and by risk assessment, was nevertheless not unfounded. It was based on factual events.

 

So much is explained by Sheinkin’s book that I will be forever grateful to him for it. Yet it is just a single book. Questions remain. Why were so many willing to risk their names, their livelihoods, their residence in the United States, their lives, for the possibility of social and economic equality, the possibility of peace through nuclear deterrence? I am drawn to look further back, to the 1930s and 1920s–and beyond?–to connect a chain that could lead to such decision-making. History remains a series of questions in infinite regress.

 

Yeah, this is a big story.

4 Aug 2019

Thomas Paine and the Dangerous Word

by | posted in: Good Reads: Nonfiction | 0

What a delightful book!

Sarah Jane Marsh shows that big events in history can be simplified for younger readers without dumbing them down. She establishes on the first two pages that Paine is a dreamer, enamored with words. On the third: “Thomas’s door to the world slammed shut.” Problem established: No more expansive thoughts for Paine. “Measuring. Cutting. Sewing.” His life is as clipped as Marsh’s sentences. A  painful period for Paine and of little interest to the author’s purpose. All we readers need to know is that it lasted “For seven…very…long…years.”

After an adventure at sea and some successes on land, Paine suffers more setbacks. Again, Marsh telescopes: “He opened his own corset-making, but the business failed. He married a maid named Mary Lambert, but she died. He worked as a preacher and teacher, but earned little. He worked for the government as a tax collector, but was fired.”

Marsh has a way of capturing her reader’s attention in surprising ways. Just as Paine is finding his voice, he pens a letter to Parliament petitioning for a raise in pay for tax collectors like himself: “Parliament ignored his proposal. But the government did take one action. They fired Thomas. Again.” After arriving in America, Paine browses in a bookshop, though what he really needs to do is find work: “Thomas struck up a conversation with the store’s owner who was launching a new magazine and needed an editor. Thomas was launching a new life and needed a job.”

The book is written in an informal style. It aims to be fun. (The illustrations reinforce the tone, though, in fact, they are a bit of a disappointment.) Yet there is a scholarliness that undergirds the entire text. The Source Notes for Quotations lists forty-six citations of Paine’s words or words by contemporaries about his words. Many of these are written large, in calligraphic script as part of the illustrations accompanying the text. (Eleven are more traditionally embedded in the back matter.) One sequence of three pages includes four documented responses to Paine’s Common Sense in illustrations of a newspaper, a letter, a speech, and a pamphlet. The large words leap off the page.

Before opening the book, I took the subtitle (“The Dangerous Word”) to be general: words are powerful. After reading it, I understand that it refers to one word, written in bold script across an entire two-page spread as Paine’s story reaches its climax: “Independence.”

15 Jul 2019

Charles Dickens and the Street Children of London

by | posted in: Good Reads: Nonfiction | 0

Charles Dickens and the Street Children of London is a biography of Charles Dickens and a brief history of a reform movement. The industrial revolution created great wealth for a few and new opportunities for a growing middle class. It also created great misery. (Best of times, worst of times, and all that.) Among the collateral damage: the street children of London who make up this book’s subtitle.

 

Author Andrea Warren makes her purpose clear from the first sentence: “Perhaps because I grew up in the security of a large family in a small town, I have always been sympathetic to the plight of homeless children.” [1] To Warren, Charles Dickens is more than a great author. He is an example one individual making a difference through vigorous, focused action.

 

The book’s narrative camera shifts between close-ups of Dickens and wide angle shots of industrializing London–occasionally with Dickens, tramping slump-shouldered through the sooty streets, as cameraman. Both stories get equal time.

 

Dickens’s youth is crucial to the whole. His idyllic early years were cut short, first when his family moved to a shabbier home in London and then when, to alleviate his father’s debts, the twelve-year-old Charles was sent to work in a blacking factory (as in shoe and boot polish). Abandoned, in a certain way, by his parents, Dickens developed an authentic empathy for London’s orphans, on which he would build an entire career. (See Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Pip, among others.)

 

It was fascinating for me to read that Dickens’s “musically gifted” sister, Fannie, was given music lessons while Charles was sent to work. [19] John Dickens, a chronic debtor, borrowed yet more money to pay Fannie’s music school tuition. A daughter received better perks than a son! It almost felt like a certain kind of justice. Yet Fannie’s musical education was later cut short, too, and she became just a music teacher. As for Mr. Dickens’s non-investment in his son, it paid off handsomely in the end both for Charles and all of mankind.

 

As it happened, Grandma Dickens died, leaving her ne’er-do-well son enough money to pay his way out of debtor’s prison. Newly freed, John Dickens had a change of heart about indenturing his own son to a bootblacker. In a dramatic scene worthy of the best fiction, John Dickens stormed into the factory and hauled his son home. (Apparently, he had to persuade his wife not to send him back.) After at least a year living as a working-class lad, Charles returned to school.

 

He made the most of it, as we know. And he became obsessed with the trappings of middle class respectability and, perhaps even more so, security. He dressed well. He shunned debt. But he did not go so far as to turn into Ebenezer Scrooge, though he understood the origins and outlines of such miserliness.

 

After tracing Dickens entry into the writing profession, Warren shows how the course of his career was shaped by both his own experiences and the people and institutions that preceded him. Surrounding chapters that focus on early Dickens novels, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, are chapters on the workhouse, the London Foundling Hospital, and the reformist efforts of Handel, Hogarth, and Dr. Barnardo. This is context in the best form. It was satisfying to be shown the world Dickens inhabited and the wider reform movement of which he was a part. Occasionally in these contextual chapters, I wondered if we were getting perhaps a bit too far afield, but invariably my doubts were allayed by the end of the chapter. Once or twice, the time shifts felt jarring–largely because, even with shifts in focus, the chronology is otherwise smooth and uninterrupted.

 

Warren focuses in on one more story, A Christmas Carol, pointing out that Dickens wrote it as a potential money-maker. As successful as he was, his responsibilities were many, including the support of his money-challenged father. The tale served its purpose and then some. Indeed it is making substantial money for theaters and film studios more than a hundred fifty years on.

 

The pace of Warren’s narrative picks up in Dickens’s later years as speaker and public figure, in addition to author. Dickens even earned a reputation for reading his own work aloud in public performances. It is not until the penultimate chapter that we get the private man: Dickens the father and husband. Warren tells us that his own family life was “only partially” reflective of the happy scenes of hearth and home that inhabited his fiction. Charles could be an entertaining dad (“loving and funny”) but also distant (“restless and moody”). Warren says it is likely that “Little Nell and Pip and David Copperfield and all the others were his true offspring.” [129-131] His marriage dissolved, though without a shame-inducing divorce.

 

It is only on the last page of this chapter that David Copperfield and Great Expectations, which had previously garnered just brief mentions, are introduced as his great autobiographical novels, especially the former. There is no need for Warren to give a plot synopsis. We have just finished the story of the great author’s life. But Charles Dickens and the Street Children of London is more than a simple biography. It is also an account of a nation’s response to the great social crisis of the nineteenth century: the breakdown of the family in the Industrial Revolution and the potential loss of a generation. Rather, it is how one man forced his country to respond by shining a light on a dark corner others chose to ignore. In the world of his fiction, Dickens humanized otherwise faceless victims, pushing his countrymen and women to open their hearts to “the street children of London.”

 

  • Andrea Warren, Charles Dickens and the Street Children of London, Houghton Mifflin, 2011
  • Images from Wikimedia Commons: Thomas Kennington “Orphans,” St. Briavel’s Debtors’ Prison, Charles Dickens by Francis Alexander, 1842