An extraordinary clandestine project ... At once a nocturnal oral history, a collection of parables worthy of Kafka and a revelatory account of despotism internalized ... Startling in their brevity and force ... Conjured long before the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), such dreams seem like Orwellian fables distilled ... Beradt’s collection does not merely catalog the fears of the moment, it records pre-emptive acquiescence signaling an erosion of resistance ... Vivid snapshots of collective unease ... Singular.
A quite straightforward picture of the psychological effects of propaganda and manipulation upon a populace ... What strikes me, reading these dreams in 2024, is the more structural conclusions Beradt makes about consent, submission, and the manipulation of minds ... Bracing.
An eerie reminder of totalitarianism’s torments, at a time when the world seems to be drifting once again towards darkness ... At times, Beradt’s book reads like a Kafka collection. ... These aren’t the abstract ramblings of a peacetime sleeper, but direct, coherent responses to the horrors of the dawn ... Just as feelings of self-loathing, guilt and shame can inspire great literature, so they define Beradt’s dream collection.
A singular window into the horror of life in Nazi Germany ... A haunting approach to the question of what totalitarianism feels to those who live under it ... Far from traditional nightmares or dreams of violence, they capture the absurd reality the Nazi regime created ... More than a collection of dark realities ... The dreams are organized into evocative thematic sections covering conformity and acquiescence, privacy, and belonging ... Erudite ... An astonishing historical analysis, The Third Reich of Dreams speaks to the dreams of those who lived under Hitler to capture the twisted realities of Nazi rule.
Quite the contrary of a psychoanalytic treatise. She is concerned not with the dreamers’ personal history and inner conflicts, but with the incursion of external forces ... Beradt arranges her book into virtual subgenres ... What The Third Reich of Dreams charts so precisely is the insidious intimacy with which the mind’s channels can be penetrated, a penetration that need not be conscious.
Offer[s] a chilling glimpse into the psychological effects of Nazi tyranny ... Defies categorization, blurring the lines between historical document, sociopolitical study and literary anthology ... An unprecedented record of how the Nazi regime extended its grip beyond the public sphere into the innermost recesses of private existence, polluting the sanctity of sleep itself ... Endures as a distinctive and unsettling portrait of life under dictatorship.
Spare but haunting ... Points to astonishing patterns in the dreams of disparate people at different ends of the political and social spectrum ... Her research demonstrates how thoroughly the rise of fascism — a 'distorted, distorting environment' of 'disintegrating values' — infected the minds of those who lived through it, while maintaining a probing focus on the choice between acquiescence and resistance. It’s a concise but powerful exploration of well-trod history that feels remarkably new.
