CYNTHIA D. BERTELSEN

This year – 2024 – scares me more than does Stephen King’s The Shining, published decades ago, 1977 to be exact. And that’s saying a lot, an awful lot.

Truth be told, I have never been able to neither read the book all the way through nor watch the film to the ghastly end. (I know the end is ghastly because I’ve inadvertently caught glimpses of it on Google.)

The Shining ought to be right up my alley: after all, the main character is a writer looking to finish a screenplay.

Jack Torrance lands a sweetheart deal as caretaker for a deserted hotel called the Overlook, nestled amidst beautiful scenery and gorgeous accommodations in Colorado. Like a retreat center, but he’s the only retreatant.

Except for his family. Especially his son Danny. Somehow, though, I find it incredible that a child of that age – five years old – narrates such a tale.

As with most of King’s books, this one – in spite of it being one of his earlier works – manages to encapsulate many societal foibles. In this case, those foibles include family dysfunction and alcoholism. Mental illness, too.

King has made no effort to hide his own battle with booze and drugs. Jack Torrance likely serves as a stand-in for King’s own mental torment at the time.

The normality of the novel’s beginning starts early on, as is the case with most of King’s books.

Since the Torrances plan to spend the better part of a year at the Overlook, Jack hints that Danny should have eaten his breakfast the day they arrive at the hotel. Fortunately, the head chef Dick Halloran takes them around the kitchen, pointing out the stock on hand, saying, “… you won’t have to worry about food because you folks can eat up here a whole year and never have the same menu twice.” In the meat locker, he gestures to  “15 rib roasts, 30 ten-pound bags of hamburger,” plus “12 turkeys, about 40 chickens, 50 sirloin steaks, two dozen of pork roasts, and 20 legs of lamb.”

Food, it seems, promises to be the least of the Torrances’ problems.

One of my own perennial worries revolves around the availability of food, probably stemming from the years I spent overseas in places where food indeed became scarce at certain times of the year.

So, I am relieved Torrances will not be resorting to shooting grouse or trapping beaver. Or starving.

I am not finding any such relief of mind as the news cycle surges relentlessly across almost all social media platforms, however.

The mere thought of the election in November chills me. Horror films? I am living in one, actually. One not even King could imagine.

As a historian, I find it unfathomable that the children and grandchildren of the Greatest Generation forget why their relatives endured days at sea, landing on beaches on the French coast on June 6, 1944, in full view of German guns and mined sand and barbed wire.

These descendants seem headed toward picking a certain man for president – again – who cares not one fig for the rule of law, believes in his omniscience, and holds nothing but disdain for people who laid down their lives for democracy and freedom.

The carefully crafted U.S. Constitution, in his opinion, exists only to wrap rotten fish heads in or as toilet paper, should there be a lack as there was during the COVID pandemic.

Because my next book concerns World War II and the events leading up to it, I am frankly terrified of what the future holds for “the land of the free, the home of the brave.”

Call it déjà vu. And rightly so.

Another family facing real terrors occupies my mind right now, not one from King’s fictional world.

I’ve been reading Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin. In great, disturbing detail, it outlines how a dictatorship takes shape, slowly and insidiously, through the experiences of one American family.

A U.S. ambassador – an outsider, not a State Department career man or an Ivy League graduate nor a man with family wealth – Southern historian William E. Dodd finds himself and his wife and two grown children caught up in the intrigue percolating in Nazi Germany.

What’s disturbing about the book is that it begins in 1933 and ends in 1934.

The groundwork for Adolf Hitler’s dream of world domination was well underway when Dodd stepped into his embassy years before World War II began. A full six years before the Nazi invasion of Poland, the European powers and the U.S. stood by, not helplessly but indifferently, arrogantly certain that Hitler was nothing but a buffoon. Dodd sees Hilter for what he represents. Despite Dodd’s close relationship with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he couldn’t turn the tide of history with his truth-telling cables and other missives. He remained in Berlin until 1937, when Roosevelt selected Hugh Wilson, a professional diplomat, to replace him.

Dodd’s blonde daughter, Martha, plays a huge role in the book. As a young, beautiful, Aryan-looking woman, she attracted the attention of several Nazi officers, including Rudolf Diels, head of the Gestapo (1933-1934). For quite a while, Martha remained blind to what Nazism represented and often created near-international scandals with her behavior. Her brother Bill and their mother Mattie stayed quietly in the background. Martha later wrote several books: Through Embassy Eyes, Ambassador Dodd’s Diary, Sowing the Wind, and The Searching Light. Her view of Nazism changed with the Night of the Long Knives.

Larson’s title comes from the park across the street from where Dodd and his family lived: The Tiergarten. Garden of the Animals. Their house was Tiergartenstrasse 27a; their Jewish landlord lived on the fourth floor because he believed his family would be safer from the Nazis there. This occurred in 1933, not later.

But for Larson, Nazism becomes the leading story, not Martha. Larson details the events that led Dodd to write in 1938, no longer an ambassador:

[S]everal policies were adopted during the first two years of the Nazi regime. The first was to suppress the Jews … They were to hold no positions in University or government operations, own no land, write nothing for newspapers, gradually give up their personal business relations, be imprisoned and many of them killed … [The Primer] betrays no indication of the propaganda activities of the Nazi government. And of course there is not a word in it to warn the unwary reader that all the people who might oppose the regime have been absolutely silenced. The central idea behind it is to make the rising generation worship their chief and get ready to “save civilization” from the Jews, from Communism and from democracy—thus preparing the way for a Nazified world where all freedom of the individual, of education, and of the churches is to be totally suppressed.

Dodd, William E. (1938). “The Bible of a Political Church”. The Nazi Primer: Official Handbook for the Schooling of Hitler Youth. Harper & Brothers

In comparison to In the Garden of Beasts, I now see The Shining more as a simple beach read …

____________________________________

Note: Among other books about the rise of the Third Reich are The Coming of the Third Reich (Evans), The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (Lipton), The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Shirer), and Inside the Third Reich (Speer).

Martha Dodd continued to live a rather scandalous life once she left Berlin.