The Third Reich of Dreams

Charlotte Beradt, who had worked as a journalist in Berlin until, from 1933 onwards, she was no longer employed, fled to England in 1939 and then to New York in 1940. She collected dreams that had occurred between the years of 1933 and 1939 by asking the people surrounding her to retell them: her seamstress, a neighbour, her aunt, the milkman, an entrepreneur friend, a physician… Fifty of those »dreams dictated by dictatorship« were included in The Third Reich of Dreams, her classic work of dream documentation first published in 1966.

An initial selection that appeared in Free World, an American magazine, in 1943 and was entitled ›Dreams Under Dictatorship‹ began with the following sentences:

»I awoke bathed in perspiration, my teeth clenched. Once again, as on countless previous nights, I had been hunted from pillar to post in a dream—shot at, tortured, scalped. But on this night, of all nights, the thought occurred to me that I might not be the only one among thousands upon thousands to be condemned to such dreams by the dictatorship. The things that filled my dreams must fill theirs, too—breathless flight across fields, hiding at the top of towers of dizzying height, cowering down below in graves, everywhere the Storm Troopers at my heels. I began to ask people about their dreams.«

»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, New York Review of Books

“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, New Yorker

»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 Centre for Politics and Humanities at Bard College

»[The reader] should look at these dreams with creative astonishment, as a lode of knowledge well worth mining.« Wladimir Gottlieb Eliasberg, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (1969)