Meet Martha Dodd, in the Flesh (So to Speak)

During my recent paperback tour for In the Garden of Beasts, I had the honor of being interviewed on stage at the U.S. Holocaust Museum by the brilliant journalist, Jane Mayer, of The New Yorker. (Disclosure: Once upon a time we were colleagues at The Wall Street Journal.) At intervals during the interview, the museum showed photographs and film depicting 1930’s Berlin, including an amazing, if brief, clip that featured Martha Dodd, a key character in my book, and her friend and likely one-time lover, Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl. Strange! If you go to the clip, be sure to watch Putzi’s eyes. Very telling, if you ask me (scroll to frame 1:18:09:19) http://resources.ushmm.org/film/display/detail.php?file_num=684

 


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Erik Larson is the author of six New York Times bestsellers, most recently The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, which examines how Winston Churchill and his “Secret Circle” went about surviving the German air campaign of 1940-41. Erik’s The Devil in the White City is set to be a Hulu limited series; his In the Garden of Beasts is under option by Tom Hanks, for a feature film. He recently published an audio-original ghost story, No One Goes Alone, which has been optioned by Netflix. Erik lives in Manhattan with his wife, who is a writer and retired neonatologist; they have three grown daughters.

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