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

Author:Erik Larson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Sociology, Social Science, Political, Historians - United States, Europe, Germany - Social Conditions - 1933-1945, Diplomats - United States, Germany, Historians, National Socialism - Germany, National Socialism, Dodd, Holocaust, William Edward, United States, Historical, History, Diplomats, Azizex666, General, Biography & Autobiography, Biography
ISBN: 9780307408846
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Published: 2011-05-10T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 31

Night Terrors

The lives of the Dodds underwent a subtle change. Where once they had felt free to say anything they wished within their own home, now they experienced a new and unfamiliar constraint. In this their lives reflected the broader miasma suffusing the city beyond their garden wall. A common story had begun to circulate: One man telephones another and in the course of their conversation happens to ask, “How is Uncle Adolf?” Soon afterward the secret police appear at his door and insist that he prove that he really does have an Uncle Adolf and that the question was not in fact a coded reference to Hitler. Germans grew reluctant to stay in communal ski lodges, fearing they might talk in their sleep. They postponed surgeries because of the lip-loosening effects of anesthetic. Dreams reflected the ambient anxiety. One German dreamed that an SA man came to his home and opened the door to his oven, which then repeated every negative remark the household had made against the government. After experiencing life in Nazi Germany, Thomas Wolfe wrote, “Here was an entire nation … infested with the contagion of an ever-present fear. It was a kind of creeping paralysis which twisted and blighted all human relations.”

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