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.
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.
