Charlotte Beradt began having unsettling dreams after Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. She envisioned herself being shot at, tortured and scalped, surrounded by Nazis in disguise, and breathlessly fleeing across fields with storm troopers at her heels. Shaken by these nightmares and banned as a Jew from working, she began secretly collecting dreams from her friends and neighbors, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Disguising these “diaries of the night” in code and concealing them in the spines of books from her extensive library, she smuggled them out of the country one by one.
Available again for the first time since its publication in the 1960s, this sensational book brings together this uniquely powerful dream record, offering a visceral understanding of how terror is internalized and how propaganda colonizes the imagination. After Beradt herself fled Germany for New York, she collected these dream accounts and began to trace the common symbols and themes that appeared in the collective unconscious of a traumatized nation. The fear of dictatorship was ever-present. Dreams of thought control, even the prohibition of dreaming itself, bore witness to the collapse of outer and inner worlds.
Now in a haunting new translation by Damion Searls and with an incisive preface by Dunya Mikhail, The Third Reich of Dreams provides a raw, unfiltered, and prophetic look inside the experience of living through Hitler’s terror.
Charlotte Beradt (1907–1986) was a Jewish journalist and Communist activist based in Berlin during the Third Reich. She fled to New York in 1939 as a refugee, creating a gathering place for other German émigrés, including Hannah Arendt. Damion Searls is an award-winning translator and writer whose translation of Jon Fosse’s novel A New Name was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi American poet whose books include The War Works Hard and The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq, which was longlisted for the National Book Award.
"A strange, enthralling book. . . . The Third Reich of Dreams is a collective diary, a witness account hauled out of a nation’s shadows and into forensic light.”"—Mireille Juchau, The New Yorker
"Beradt offers us not a complex hermeneutics of totalitarianism but rather a quite straight forward picture of the psychological effects of propaganda and manipulation upon a populace. . . . How does one become a totalitarian subject? What—aside from the threat of violence—are the necessary conditions? These are questions Beradt’s dreaming people daren’t ask themselves in the cold light of day, but the queries reappear under cover of night."—Zadie Smith, New York Review of Books
“This is the kind of book that haunts your dreams. Essential reading for anyone who has known what it is like to live within a totalitarian state—or is worried they’re about to find out.”—Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth
“At once terrifying and illuminating, Beradt’s riveting dream book takes us deep into the psychological subject under Nazism. Its republication could not be timelier. The Kafkaesque landscape that emerges is all the more frightening because it is so close not only to the ordinary experience of Nazi times but also perhaps increasingly our own.”—Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad, and Sad
“Drawing from a collection of dreams experienced by people living under the expanding shadow of Nazi rule, Beradt reveals how terror infiltrates not just public life but the depths of the subconscious. Vividly rendered in Damion Searls’s crisp and haunting translation, The Third Reich of Dreams illuminates the profound vulnerability of life under systems of surveillance, domination, and racism. Beradt makes palpable the total domination possible under totalitarian rule.”—Roger Berkowitz, founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College
“What happens when your dreams are no longer your own? This new translation of Charlotte Beradt’s terrifying look into the collective unconscious appears as a warning in our age of ideology, foreshadowing what happens to the inner life of a person who is forced to live under conditions of dictatorship. Fascinating and unsettling, Beradt’s collection of dreams reveals what happens when the distinction between fact and fiction ceases to exist.”—Samantha Rose Hill, author of Hannah Arendt
