Life
The Third Reich of Dreams review: ‘surreal testimonies to a nightmarish reality’
This is a fascinating piece of work about people’s dreams in Nazi Germany
June 27, 2025 15:26
This is a fascinating piece of work about people’s dreams in Nazi Germany
June 27, 2025 15:26Charlotte Beradt was born in 1907 into a wealthy Berlin-Jewish family. She worked as a journalist until 1933, when the new Nazi regime forced her out of employment as a Jew and a committed socialist. In 1939, more or less at the last minute, she and her husband fled to New York via London.
Yet since 1933, Beradt had been having nightmares of being attacked and tortured, surrounded by Nazis in disguise, and pursued by stormtroopers. She began to ask other people about their dreams – not enthusiastic supporters of the regime, with whom she did not have much contact, but otherwise as wide a demographic selection as possible – “the dressmaker, the neighbour, an aunt, a milkman, a friend”.
Beradt claimed to have collected more than 300 individual dream fragments. As she transcribed the dreams, she encoded them to mitigate the risk of discovery by the authorities and eventually mailed them to addresses in foreign countries. Once she had emigrated, she was able to reassemble a substantial archive.
Around 50 fragments are presented in The Third Reich of Dreams, which was published in German in 1966, and is now translated into English for the first time.
Beradt notes that at that time, it was difficult “to narrate dreams without touching on psychological theories”. Had she wished to draw on, say, the Freudian or post-Freudian tradition of dream interpretation, she would have been well positioned to do so, having mixed in psychoanalytic circles before the war.
Yet she denies that the dreams in the book relate to personal traumas. Instead, they deal with “a public realm full of stress and agitation from all the half-truths, half-intuitions, facts, rumours, and conjectures floating around in it”. In other words, the dreams show the unreflective processing of individuals of their political environment.
In America, Beradt had become a close friend of the political theorist Hannah Arendt, who saw totalitarianism as power exercised through communication and thought. The best-known version of this critique is the notion of “thoughtcrime” in George Orwell’s 1984. Both Arendt and Orwell are cited approvingly in Beradt’s book, which characterises dreaming as one of the last potential holdouts of individual autonomy under Nazism.
Each chapter of The Third Reich of Dreams presents a different dimension of the Nazi assault on private life.
There are dreams related to the regime’s rules and edicts: for example, speaking banned words, owning proscribed books. Self-expression becomes criminal – only sanctioned forms of discourse may be employed.
Surveillance is ubiquitous (ordinary household objects turn into bugging devices, a stove starts barking orders).
Some of the dreams show individuals shamefully catching themselves in the act of conforming to the system when they know they could and should dissent.
Others present dreamers knowingly adopting the regime’s ideological tenets (antisemitism especially) – “suggestion becomes autosuggestion”, as Beradt puts it.
A rare few dreamers display a capacity for opposition (it is not clear how Beradt had access to the dream of the resistance leader Sophie Scholl the night before her execution in 1943, but it is included). Other dreams indicate concealed or unconcealed wishes for accommodation with the regime.
Beradt’s final category is “Jewish Dreamers”, who are presented as undergoing an extreme form of “uprooting”: “displacement, disorientation, depersonalization, and loss of identity and continuity”.
Doubtless this formulation reflects the émigré author’s own feelings, and the dreams she narrates are certainly harrowing. She stresses, though, that the deracination spoken of in Jewish dreams is different more in intensity than in kind from the experience of the Germans under Nazism, a claim that may give many readers pause.
The Third Reich of Dreams is a fascinating piece of work. To some, it may seem under-theorised; to others, it might seem too quick to assimilate specific Jewish sufferings to the general harms of 20th-century totalitarianism.
Ultimately, the book stands or falls on Beradt’s lucid retelling of the dreams themselves as surreal testimonies to a nightmarish reality.
The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation
by Charlotte Beradt, Translated by Damion Searls
Princeton University Press