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. Available again for the first time since its publication in the 1960s, this book brings together this dream record, offering an understanding of how terror is internalized and how propaganda colonizes the imagination.
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.
This travelogue through the German unconscious will look chillingly familiar to anyone living in Trump’s America ... Beradt’s study casts an eerie, mesmeric spell ... Though neither a psychoanalyst nor a sociologist, Beradt provided sharply insightful commentary on her subjects’ dreams.
