The Third Reich of Dreams
The Nightmares of a Nation
A singular window into the horror of life in Nazi Germany, Charlotte Beradt’s anthropological study addresses the dreams that she and her fellow German citizens began having after Adolf Hitler came to power.
A haunting approach to the question of what totalitarianism feels to those who live under it, the book analyzes dreams recorded between 1933 and 1939 from over three hundred individuals in Nazi Germany. These are the dreams of doctors and milkmen, “Aryans” and Jews, and political and nonpolitical people. Far from traditional nightmares or dreams of violence, they capture the absurd reality the Nazi regime created.
The book articulates how Nazi domination invaded the most intimate human spaces. A factory owner is humiliated in a dream of trying to lift his arm in salute to Goebbels for thirty minutes until Goebbels says he doesn’t want the salute anyway. Some dream of being forbidden to dream. One man dreams of being caught in the crime of not enjoying anything.
While the dreams appear “like mosaics … whose individual tesserae are pieces of the reality of the Third Reich,” the text is more than a collection of dark realities. The dreams are organized into evocative thematic sections covering conformity and acquiescence, privacy, and belonging. These themes are highlighted through commentary interspersed among the excerpted dreams. There’s background information on the dreamers and an overarching moral seriousness that attends to the trauma and ever-present danger inherent to totalitarianism. For additional context, Beradt’s erudite analysis links dream realities to other studies of totalitarianism, as with those of Hannah Arendt and Bertolt Brecht.
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.
Reviewed by
Willem Marx
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