Charlotte Beradt's The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation — newly translated and back in print after decades — shows how totalitarianism invades not only our waking lives but our sleeping minds.
Originally compiled by Beradt, a Jewish journalist living under Hitler's regime, the book catalogs over 300 dreams from ordinary Germans in the early years of Nazi rule. After being barred from work by Nazi race laws, Beradt began collecting these nightmares, hiding her accounts in book spines and mailing them to friends abroad before escaping to New York in 1939.
What makes this work so unsettling is how it reveals fascism's intrusion into the most private realm of human experience. As Mark Dery writes in his Washington Post review, the dreams show "the civil war we're fighting in our sleep" — one that feels disturbingly relevant to our current political moment.
The dreams themselves are eerie transmissions from a society under totalitarian pressure. From Dery:
We meet a 45-year-old doctor whose dream dramatizes the disappearance of privacy in a police state: He is about to relax with a book at the end of a long workday when the walls of his apartment suddenly vanish. "I looked around in horror and saw that none of the apartments as far as the eye could see had any walls left. I heard a loudspeaker blare: 'Per Wall Abolition Decree dated the 17th of this month.'" A "liberal, cultured" young woman has an ominous vision of a world in which the individual has been snuffed out, subsumed in the mass-produced masses of fascism. In her dream, street signs have been outlawed; they have been replaced by placards listing "the twenty words it was now forbidden to speak," the last of which, tellingly, is the word "I." In a society where criticism of the regime or jokes about the Führer could have dire, even fatal consequences, household objects come to life and rat out their owners: A middle-aged housewife dreams that the "old-fashioned blue-tiled stove" in her living room, the heart of her family's domestic life, betrays her. When a stormtrooper makes an unwelcome visit, the stove begins to talk "in a shrill, penetrating voice," telling him "everything we'd said against the regime, every joke we'd told."
Beradt's subjects even dreamed about being forbidden to dream — a testament to how thoroughly authoritarianism can colonize consciousness. Some reported deliberately telling "forbidden jokes" incorrectly in their dreams to avoid punishment.
The parallels to our current moment aren't subtle. As Dery points out, "the Trump administration's demonization of inconvenient truths as "fake news," its Orwellian attempts to erase or rewrite history, and its torrent of misinformation, memes, conspiracy theories, gaslighting and trolling have imparted a dreamlike quality to life in the MAGA era, and not in a good way. There's a pervasive feeling of ghastly unreality."
What Beradt documented wasn't yet the Holocaust, but rather the early erosion of civil liberties, attacks on dissent, and the insidious infiltration of private life. She showed how dreams functioned as what Dery calls "places we can speak the truths drowned out by the hurricane of crazy that's howling through America."
Previously:
• Controlling your dreams for fun and science
• Controlling lucid dreams, for real
• Advertisers trying to target your dreams
