Garden of Beasts live-reading reactions or something
Okay. Page 232, I am literally getting goosebumps.
I really had to put down the book just now because what I said in my first babbly post about this book about it being a train wreck waiting to happen? Well, now the engine's building steam and going more and more out of control.
This book has been very consistent in coupling the most frivolous concerns of the times and location with the most heinous and upsetting of crimes and violence and oppression. (I mean, you just really really don't think of the "bad guys" in all of this doing the He-Said-She-Said thing and having SOCIAL DISPUTES of all things and yet--!) Just trying to even imagine the paranoia running rampant in Berlin during the winter described from memoirs and journals and diplomatic dispatches give me a chill and made me sit up on my bed, keeping my back to the wall, thinking that someone's in the room watching my every move.
I've always had an over-active imagination, but now I'm really seeing why even now, decades after all of this, we still have this impression of that regime being the worst of humanity--even though this kind of thing happened in Soviet Russia near the same time! I suppose everyone was more afraid of Germany than Russia at the time, the last War still on their minds and all, but really...
And just now got to a second of story-telling of the incident where a mock-trial against Hitler was arranged in New York's Madison Square Garden--and Hitler was FURIOUS and all the German ambassadors to the US was insisting that the US get its citizens to stop at once. I'll need to quote this one from the book (which is quote from those sources I previously mentioned):
On March 1, 1934, the German embassy's number-two man, Rudolf Leitner, met with a State Department official named John Hickerson and urged him to "do something to prevent this trial because of its lamentable effect on German public opinion if it should take place." Hickerson replied that owing to "our constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression" the federal government could do nothing to stop it.
Leitner found this difficult to fathom. He told Hickerson "that if the circumstances were reverse the German Government would certainly find a way of 'stopping such a proceeding.'"
On this point Hickerson had no doubt. "I replied," Hickerson wrote, "that it is my understanding that the German Government is not so limited in the action which it can take in such matters as the American government."
And then poor Dodd had to deal with the repercussions on his end as the American ambassador to Germany and... they. Kept insisting that the American government get in control of their people but the federal government just went "... but they have the First Amendment. Nothing to be done. Freedom of speech and all that." And the Germans just gave them glowering glares.
I. Yes. These are things that are just left out in history. IT IS REALLY VERY INTENSE to try to put myself in the position these people were in.
And it's only going to get worse, because this is after all history and we all know what happens, but I just read on which note this book will be climaxing on and. I'm. Yes. This is a really heavy book to read.
Though I do often try to make light of it by joking about how Hitler takes terrible pictures (he's really not very photogenic, in my opinion) and about past American presidents (idk why but it's just easier to be flippant about my country's former presidents than it is to be flippant about other countries' former or current leaders, even--typical, really). And just ffff.
Lots of thoughts. Need to finish this book.
The terrible thing is that it's so easy to get caught up in Larson's writing and picture it as historical fiction. And then you stop. And you have the sickening reminder that no. This is REAL history. Historical NON-ficition. Actual accounts from people who have lived through it. And that's when everything becomes sobering and gives you chills.
Like I said, at least with Devil in the White City, you had the grandiose and hopeful and successful venture of the Fair to counteract that sort of sensation (at least until you got to the next bit with H. H. Holmes). Garden of Beasts is very much unmerciful with how things just go from bad to worse--as it should do. History, after all, should not be kind or hide away the unpleasant accounts of horrors that have been done in this world.
Once again, I have to say I prefer Larson's way of putting history into a more easily consumed form. More people should appreciate history the way he seems to, considering the care he takes with it.
... you know the most ironic thing about this? The part that made me most uncomfortable and most easily unnerved was the whole aspect of the paranoia running around Berlin at the time. Big Brother watching levels, I mean. Gestapo seemingly everywhere (they actually weren't and had smaller amount of force than say, the SA or SS), people looking over their shoulders, not able to speak in their own homes for fear of being overheard regarding the most personal of things...
Being so unnerved by that... and then realizing LOL. That is EXACTLY the world we live in today. There is no privacy. Everyone's listening in on everyone. Cellphones and internet and other such devices making it so easy to keep tabs on people and their own words... the one thing that unnerved people so badly back in the day, we now accept as willingly as sheep.
I find that both amusingly ironic and also horrifically tragic.
Does it make me an even worse person if I see this, understand it, sort of loathe it, and yet still accept it--seeing as I'm even running to the internet now to write all of this down?
.
I really had to put down the book just now because what I said in my first babbly post about this book about it being a train wreck waiting to happen? Well, now the engine's building steam and going more and more out of control.
This book has been very consistent in coupling the most frivolous concerns of the times and location with the most heinous and upsetting of crimes and violence and oppression. (I mean, you just really really don't think of the "bad guys" in all of this doing the He-Said-She-Said thing and having SOCIAL DISPUTES of all things and yet--!) Just trying to even imagine the paranoia running rampant in Berlin during the winter described from memoirs and journals and diplomatic dispatches give me a chill and made me sit up on my bed, keeping my back to the wall, thinking that someone's in the room watching my every move.
I've always had an over-active imagination, but now I'm really seeing why even now, decades after all of this, we still have this impression of that regime being the worst of humanity--even though this kind of thing happened in Soviet Russia near the same time! I suppose everyone was more afraid of Germany than Russia at the time, the last War still on their minds and all, but really...
And just now got to a second of story-telling of the incident where a mock-trial against Hitler was arranged in New York's Madison Square Garden--and Hitler was FURIOUS and all the German ambassadors to the US was insisting that the US get its citizens to stop at once. I'll need to quote this one from the book (which is quote from those sources I previously mentioned):
On March 1, 1934, the German embassy's number-two man, Rudolf Leitner, met with a State Department official named John Hickerson and urged him to "do something to prevent this trial because of its lamentable effect on German public opinion if it should take place." Hickerson replied that owing to "our constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression" the federal government could do nothing to stop it.
Leitner found this difficult to fathom. He told Hickerson "that if the circumstances were reverse the German Government would certainly find a way of 'stopping such a proceeding.'"
On this point Hickerson had no doubt. "I replied," Hickerson wrote, "that it is my understanding that the German Government is not so limited in the action which it can take in such matters as the American government."
And then poor Dodd had to deal with the repercussions on his end as the American ambassador to Germany and... they. Kept insisting that the American government get in control of their people but the federal government just went "... but they have the First Amendment. Nothing to be done. Freedom of speech and all that." And the Germans just gave them glowering glares.
I. Yes. These are things that are just left out in history. IT IS REALLY VERY INTENSE to try to put myself in the position these people were in.
And it's only going to get worse, because this is after all history and we all know what happens, but I just read on which note this book will be climaxing on and. I'm. Yes. This is a really heavy book to read.
Though I do often try to make light of it by joking about how Hitler takes terrible pictures (he's really not very photogenic, in my opinion) and about past American presidents (idk why but it's just easier to be flippant about my country's former presidents than it is to be flippant about other countries' former or current leaders, even--typical, really). And just ffff.
Lots of thoughts. Need to finish this book.
The terrible thing is that it's so easy to get caught up in Larson's writing and picture it as historical fiction. And then you stop. And you have the sickening reminder that no. This is REAL history. Historical NON-ficition. Actual accounts from people who have lived through it. And that's when everything becomes sobering and gives you chills.
Like I said, at least with Devil in the White City, you had the grandiose and hopeful and successful venture of the Fair to counteract that sort of sensation (at least until you got to the next bit with H. H. Holmes). Garden of Beasts is very much unmerciful with how things just go from bad to worse--as it should do. History, after all, should not be kind or hide away the unpleasant accounts of horrors that have been done in this world.
Once again, I have to say I prefer Larson's way of putting history into a more easily consumed form. More people should appreciate history the way he seems to, considering the care he takes with it.
... you know the most ironic thing about this? The part that made me most uncomfortable and most easily unnerved was the whole aspect of the paranoia running around Berlin at the time. Big Brother watching levels, I mean. Gestapo seemingly everywhere (they actually weren't and had smaller amount of force than say, the SA or SS), people looking over their shoulders, not able to speak in their own homes for fear of being overheard regarding the most personal of things...
Being so unnerved by that... and then realizing LOL. That is EXACTLY the world we live in today. There is no privacy. Everyone's listening in on everyone. Cellphones and internet and other such devices making it so easy to keep tabs on people and their own words... the one thing that unnerved people so badly back in the day, we now accept as willingly as sheep.
I find that both amusingly ironic and also horrifically tragic.
Does it make me an even worse person if I see this, understand it, sort of loathe it, and yet still accept it--seeing as I'm even running to the internet now to write all of this down?
.