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Mint
2 days ago
- Politics
- Mint
In Germany, the Nazis invaded people's dreams
The Third Reich of Dreams. By Charlotte Beradt. Translated by Damion Searls. Princeton University Press; 152 pages; $24.95 and £20 In 1933, after Adolf Hitler had taken power, a German housewife dreamed that her stove was snooping on her. 'It said everything we'd said against the regime, every joke we'd told" to an eavesdropping stormtrooper. 'God, I thought, what is it going to say next? All my little comments about Goebbels?" The woman's fears about privacy and Hitler's chief propagandist were recorded by Charlotte Beradt, a Jewish journalist who collected the dreams of Germans under fascism. Three decades earlier Sigmund Freud had posited that dreams reveal unconscious thoughts. To Beradt, they disclosed truths about authoritarianism that no one would dare say aloud. Some of her subjects were nervous to share their stories. Half a dozen dreamed that it was forbidden to dream. A businessman imagined that Goebbels visited his factory. 'It took me half an hour to get my arm raised, millimetre by millimetre," he recounted. As he struggled to salute, his spine snapped. Beradt collected dreams from more than 300 people over several years, transcribing them in code. 'Party" became 'family"; Hitler became 'Uncle Hans". She concealed the records in bookbindings and smuggled them abroad. They were published in Germany in 1966; an early English translation went out of print. Newly translated, the remarkable collection—which is unique in the canon of Holocaust literature—may now find more readers. It arrives at a time when people are more interested in the connection between sleep and well-being than ever before. Beradt organises the material into types of dreams, interweaving the accounts with her own trenchant analysis. A man imagines sitting down to write a formal complaint against the regime, but the page he sends in is blank—a dream reflecting his inaction. An eye doctor pictures that he is summoned to treat Hitler because 'I was the only one in the world who could; I was proud of myself for that, and felt so ashamed of my pride that I started crying"—a dream suffused with guilt. A young woman envisions having to produce identity papers and she is desperate to prove that she is not Jewish—a dream of racial paranoia. Many of the dreams are eerily prophetic. The doctor dreams about Nazi militiamen knocking out hospital windows four years before Kristallnacht, the 'night of broken glass" (pictured on previous page), when stormtroopers destroyed buildings including synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses. The woman dreams of hiding under 'a big pile of dead bodies". It was the early 1930s, years before the world would learn of the mass murder committed in concentration camps. The dreams of Germans in the resistance are different. The night before her execution, Sophie Scholl, a 21-year-old activist, dreamed that she was carrying a baby up a mountain to be baptised. Before she could get to the church, a crevasse cracked open on her path; she was able to set the baby down before she disappeared into the chasm. Scholl saw this as a metaphor for the fight against fascism. 'The child is our idea, and it will prevail despite all obstacles," she explained. 'We can prepare the way for it, even though we will have to die for it before its victory." Beradt puts Jewish dreamers in their own section as their dreams, 'sharpened by the acute threat they were downright clairvoyant". In 1935 a housewife dreamed that 'We shouldn't go back to our homes, something was going to happen." She wanders from building to building, seeking refuge and finding none. As Beradt notes, the dream anticipated events to come—the displacement of Jews in hiding during the 'final solution". Robert Ley, a high-ranking Nazi, suggested in 1938 that the only Germans with any privacy were those sleeping. He under-rated the regime's power. Dreams reflect and refract an individual's experience, shaped as it is by policy and the public mood. Even in sleep, the Reich occupied the minds of its subjects. For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter
Spectator
09-07-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
There was no escaping the Nazis
Soon after Hitler came to power in 1933, Charlotte Beradt, who as a Jewish journalist and a communist had been barred from publishing, found her sleep wracked by nightmares that unmistakably reenacted the terrors of the Nazi regime. Deprived of her regular employment, her own dream experiences prompted the subversive if dangerous idea of recording the dreams of her fellow citizens. 'I began to collect the dreams that the Nazi dictatorship had, as it were, dictated,' she wrote. Citing a dictum of a Nazi official that in Hitler's Germany no one has a private life except while asleep, the material she collected demonstrated how dreams 'as minutely as a seismograph' can record impinging external realities. For much of my working life I practised as a psychoanalyst and both in my private and professional experience I've encountered dreams which report not merely on the vicissitudes of the dreamer's personal unconscious conflicts but bear unmistakable marks of the incursion of prevailing objective events. While reading The Third Reich of Dreams, first published in the 1960s, I had a relevant experience. I dreamt that one of the long-dead members of the Jewish Brigade, with whom my father was interned as a POW during the second world war, had been banned from giving a lecture at Cambridge (my alma mater) and was asking for my help in gathering support to resist the ban. The book had brought to the forefront of my unconscious, via my family's history, the pernicious recurrence of anti-Semitism in our own day. Beradt was not a disciple of psychoanalysis, and the dreams she recorded were not opaque dramas requiring professional psychological decoding. On the contrary, they are remarkably easy to analyse. Her sample dreamers include 'a dressmaker, neighbour, aunt, milkman, friend'. She writes that she generally didn't reveal her purpose, 'for I wanted the most candid and unaffected responses possible'. One woman dreams that lists of verboten words, the first 'Lord' and the last 'I', had been posted all round her neighbourhood. Another finds herself surrounded by innocent seeming workmen, prompting no anxiety until she spots a chimney sweep (because of the association with black, her family's code for the SS). The men then all perform a Nazi salute, chorusing: 'Your guilt cannot be doubted.' Herr S, a factory owner, dreams of a factory inspection by Goebbels, to whom he finds himself incapable of making a Nazi salute. After a protracted struggle to raise his arm, his spine cracks and breaks – one of several dreams whose meaning requires no elucidation. Many others are about cunning methods of thought-policing, suggesting an intuitive recognition of this form of state terrorism long before Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-four. In one, a stormtrooper opens the door of the cosy stove that warms the dreamer's home and from it a shrill voice repeats all the jokes, criticisms and anti-establishment comments made by the household. In another, a lawyer, chatting to his brother on the phone, comments that he doesn't 'enjoy anything any more'. In the middle of the night the phone rings and a voice announces ominously,: 'This is the telephone Surveillance Office,' at which the terrified dreamer begins to grovel for forgiveness for the treasonable crime of non-enjoyment. A number of dreams indicate a distressing degree of self-identification with Nazi propaganda. A Jewish dreamer sits on a rubbish bin and hangs a notice around his neck declaring: 'I'll make way for the trash.' Perhaps most illuminating are the dreams that indicate the dreamer's recognition of the psychological toll that internal collaboration with the morality of the state will take. A young woman with a Christian father and a Jewish mother has a series of dreams in which she feels profound hatred for the mother to whom she had always been close. A doctor finds himself in a concentration camp where there were dinner parties and plays performed and, in the dream, thinks 'Well then, so it really is all exaggerated, the things you hear about the camps' until he observes himself in a mirror wearing polished jackboots and a Nazi uniform. Besides being brave, Beradt was shrewd: she protected herself and her fellow dreamers by concealing her findings in the bindings of her own books. She disguised the appearance of any political figures, turning Hitler, Göring and Goebbels into genial family members Uncles Hans, Gustav, and Gerhard. When the arm of state control grew more menacing, she posted her notes to friends overseas. Happily, she escaped Nazi Germany and turned her groundbreaking field research into this short but sharply insightful and disquieting book. Her acute observations on the insidious reach of totalitarian ideology are bolstered by telling quotations from Orwell, Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka and Hannah Arendt. Many of the dreams have the dislocating, quasi-rational quality of a Kafka short story and Beradt's considered conclusions make a worthy coda to Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. As the world turns darker and the exercise of state power again becomes more habitual, this book is a timely reminder that the culture we allow ourselves to exist within is capable of making deep and damaging inroads into our collective psyche.
Telegraph
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Jewish journalist who secretly recorded the nocturnal terrors of a Nazi nation
Newly translated into English, The Third Reich of Dreams maps the eerie unconscious of 1930s Germans as documented by Charlotte Beradt
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
They Dreamed of Hitler
The skull is a thin barrier against totalitarianism. The system is total because the brain itself is recruitable; every intimate space can be touched. Hannah Arendt once recorded the words of a Nazi official to that effect: 'The only person who is still a private individual in Germany is somebody who is asleep.' But this is wrong. Sleep is exactly where the stress of living under such a terrorizing regime could reveal itself—in dreams. Charlotte Beradt, a German Jewish journalist who experienced Hitler's rise from her middle-class Berlin neighborhood, found the messages contained in her friends' and neighbors' dreams irresistibly interesting. They were reflections in the psyche, she wrote, tracing 'as minutely as a seismograph' the changes happening in waking life. Starting in 1933, she wrote down these dreams—or 'nightaries,' she called them, for night diaries—and, fearing the regime, she rendered them in code. 'Hitler' became 'Uncle Hans'; 'the party' became 'the family'; an 'arrest' became the 'flu.' She hid what surely sounded like the stories of a clan of sickly people beholden to a strange uncle in the spines of large books in her library until she could smuggle them out of the country. She knew how dangerous her collecting was—some of the people whose accounts she recorded even dreamed that dreaming itself had been made illegal. It took Beradt until 1966 to turn her 300 'nightaries' into a book, The Third Reich of Dreams. By then she was living in New York City, reconstituting her life after escaping Nazi Germany in 1939. She worked for a time in her apartment as a hairdresser to other emigrés—including Marc Chagall's wife, Bella—and became close with Arendt, even translating some of her English-language essays into German. Beradt's own book became something of a cult classic, known among those interested in the deep effects of authoritarianism on human behavior and thought, but it nevertheless went out of print. This spring, it is being reissued in a crisp new translation from Damion Searls. Beradt recorded the dreams of people experiencing immense political stress and a seeping sense of fear. They are the kinds of anxiety dreams one might expect in any tense, unstable situation—these just happen to have swastikas. A household stove starts to speak in a 'shrill, penetrating voice' and share family secrets; the walls of a home collapse; someone slowly lifts his arm into a Hitler salute over half an hour until the pressure makes his spine snap; a large nose becomes a dangerous liability. These were the dreams of people breaking under pressure. Much weirder to encounter are the dreams of people bending under it—visions that Beradt believed exposed a deep wish to conform. [Timothy W. Ryback: Hitler's terrible tariffs] Beradt is no Freudian. She wants us to know this. For her, these are not personal dramas playing out in someone's head. They don't contain hidden, symbolic meanings. If you dreamed in 1933 that Hitler was caressing your shoulders, Freud would probably say you had issues with your father. For Beradt, this means one, very obvious thing, very much having to do with Hitler. She reads the dreams straightforwardly as attempts by the subconscious mind to make sense of a waking reality full of 'half-truths, half-intuitions, facts, rumors, and conjunctures.' Shorn of daily propaganda and spin, they contain the kinds of exaggerations and distillations, the kinds of storytelling, that could make Nazism's effects on the individual more shockingly legible: 'The dreams are a blend of logical thought and guesswork; rational details combined into fantastical contexts and thereby made more, not less, coherent.' So what coherent message emerges from these surreal dreams of conformity? Beradt offers up a series of them. Many involve Hitler suddenly transforming into a charming, sociable fellow. In one, the dictator appears in quite a telling getup: 'high, shining patent-leather jackboots, like a lion tamer, and crumpled but sparkly purple satin pants like a circus clown.' This lion tamer/clown Hitler is the life of the party. Everyone is taken in by his 'flirtatious' air. The dreamer at first is disgusted and prepares his comeback in case Hitler should approach him ('I have to be here but I know about the concentration camps and I'm opposed'). By the end of the dream, though, he is won over too. He looks down, and in his hands is the same collection box all of Hitler's followers are carrying. 'Well, maybe he's not so bad,' he thinks to himself. 'Maybe I'm taking all this trouble to be opposed for nothing.' Other dreams follow the same pattern. A woman mocks a group of people singing political songs and then finds herself singing along. An older man is laughing at a newsreel featuring Hermann Goering in a brown leather vest, and then he himself is wearing the same vest and is being offered a job as Goering's bodyguard. One report was a simple statement: 'I dreamt I said, 'I don't have to always say No anymore.'' Beradt interprets these dreams as a side effect of what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung, or synchronizing. Germans were supposed to align their thinking with the regime and squash any inclination toward dissent. The dreams disclose a desire to succumb to this process. 'Freedom is a burden; unfreedom comes as a relief,' she writes—the most chilling line in the book. She is confident about her reading, but I'm not sure I completely follow her logic. There are at least two reasons someone would have a dream of collaboration. It's possible that the person secretly wishes to join the saluting masses, but it's equally plausible that they, more than others, are subconsciously warning themselves, preparing to put up a fight. The drive to conform is strong; it's arguably what has allowed our social species to survive as long as it has. But just as strong is the moral conscience: the worry that you won't be able to live with yourself if you violate an inner code. The realm of sleep might be the perfect place for this battle to rage, and though Beradt thinks that someone who collaborates in their dreams is probably already considering doing so in real life, they might in fact be flirting with unfreedom subconsciously as a way of relieving this particular itch and fortifying themselves. [Read: Looks like Mussolini, quacks like Mussolini] The tools of psychoanalysis could actually help here, connecting the dreamer with the shape of the dream. Freud did not deny that external stimuli could affect the subconscious. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he refers to an experiment in which an alarm clock was rung next to two sleepers. One dreams of a church bell tolling, and the other hears sleigh bells. If a patient spent enough time on the couch, the analyst could account for the difference. But because Beradt wants to read the dreams she records as straight projections of political reality, it's hard to tell whether these night fantasies about surrendering to Hitler's charms are the product of weak, susceptible minds or those sharply attuned to the moral stakes. Maybe it doesn't matter. Beradt's point is a more basic one: Authoritarianism hijacks people's brains. Her book reveals a real-time shock at how thoroughly and quickly the Nazis stormed into those deepest recesses. Sex dreams about Hitler, she hints, were not uncommon. Those actively resisting the regime kept battling and escaping Nazis when they closed their eyes. One woman who produced and distributed an illegal newspaper told Beradt about dreams of vengeance that sound like scenes from a Quentin Tarantino film: jumping from balcony to balcony, tearing down swastika flags, and stabbing her pursuers one by one. A friend of mine—an American citizen, I should add—recounted to me a dream he had last week. He was at the Canadian border and trying to reenter the United States, but was stopped by border guards. He was carrying a gun in his backpack and was about to make it through undetected, but then the guards noticed something amiss in his paperwork and decided to search him. When it became clear they were going to find the gun, he woke up in a panic. What would Beradt make of this nightmare—of the anxiety it exhibits about surveillance and authority and displacement? And what might she deduce about the atmosphere of fear and violence that inspired it? Her analysis of dreams taps into a primordial function that night visions played in human society long before Freud showed up. They were in fact treated like psychic seismographs, picking up disturbances and instability, prophecies of good fortune or doom. To know if the crops would thrive this season or what the king's death portended, premodern people turned to the subconscious as a tool for seeing beyond what was immediately accessible to them. Understood this way, dreams are perfect for registering nascent authoritarianism and the ways its repressions actually unfold: not as a single announcement or explosive act but as a steady, growing rumble while the ground beneath your feet begins to shift. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
23-04-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
When Nazis Enter Your Dreams
The skull is a thin barrier against totalitarianism. The system is total because the brain itself is recruitable; every intimate space can be touched. Hannah Arendt once recorded the words of a Nazi official to that effect: 'The only person who is still a private individual in Germany is somebody who is asleep.' But this is wrong. Sleep is exactly where the stress of living under such a terrorizing regime could reveal itself—in dreams. Charlotte Beradt, a German Jewish journalist who experienced Hitler's rise from her middle-class Berlin neighborhood, found the messages contained in her friends' and neighbors' dreams irresistibly interesting. They were reflections in the psyche, she wrote, tracing 'as minutely as a seismograph' the changes happening in waking life. Starting in 1933, she wrote down these dreams—or 'nightaries,' she called them, for night diaries —and, fearing the regime, she rendered them in code. 'Hitler' became 'Uncle Hans'; 'the party' became 'the family'; an 'arrest' became the 'flu.' She hid what surely sounded like the stories of a clan of sickly people beholden to a strange uncle in the spines of large books in her library until she could smuggle them out of the country. She knew how dangerous her collecting was—some of the people whose accounts she recorded even dreamed that dreaming itself had been made illegal. It took Beradt until 1966 to turn her 300 'nightaries' into a book, The Third Reich of Dreams. By then she was living in New York City, reconstituting her life after escaping Nazi Germany in 1939. She worked for a time in her apartment as a hairdresser to other emigrés—including Marc Chagall's wife, Bella—and became close with Arendt, even translating some of her English-language essays into German. Beradt's own book became something of a cult classic, known among those interested in the deep effects of authoritarianism on human behavior and thought, but it nevertheless went out of print. This spring, it is being reissued in a crisp new translation from Damion Searls. Beradt recorded the dreams of people experiencing immense political stress and a seeping sense of fear. They are the kinds of anxiety dreams one might expect in any tense, unstable situation—these just happen to have swastikas. A household stove starts to speak in a 'shrill, penetrating voice' and share family secrets; the walls of a home collapse; someone slowly lifts his arm into a Hitler salute over half an hour until the pressure makes his spine snap; a large nose becomes a dangerous liability. These were the dreams of people breaking under pressure. Much weirder to encounter are the dreams of people bending under it—visions that Beradt believed exposed a deep wish to conform. Timothy W. Ryback: Hitler's terrible tariffs Beradt is no Freudian. She wants us to know this. For her, these are not personal dramas playing out in someone's head. They don't contain hidden, symbolic meanings. If you dreamed in 1933 that Hitler was caressing your shoulders, Freud would probably say you had issues with your father. For Beradt, this means one, very obvious thing, very much having to do with Hitler. She reads the dreams straightforwardly as attempts by the subconscious mind to make sense of a waking reality full of 'half-truths, half-intuitions, facts, rumors, and conjunctures.' Shorn of daily propaganda and spin, they contain the kinds of exaggerations and distillations, the kinds of storytelling, that could make Nazism's effects on the individual more shockingly legible: 'The dreams are a blend of logical thought and guesswork; rational details combined into fantastical contexts and thereby made more, not less, coherent.' So what coherent message emerges from these surreal dreams of conformity? Beradt offers up a series of them. Many involve Hitler suddenly transforming into a charming, sociable fellow. In one, the dictator appears in quite a telling getup: 'high, shining patent-leather jackboots, like a lion tamer, and crumpled but sparkly purple satin pants like a circus clown.' This lion tamer/clown Hitler is the life of the party. Everyone is taken in by his 'flirtatious' air. The dreamer at first is disgusted and prepares his comeback in case Hitler should approach him ('I have to be here but I know about the concentration camps and I'm opposed'). By the end of the dream, though, he is won over too. He looks down, and in his hands is the same collection box all of Hitler's followers are carrying. 'Well, maybe he's not so bad,' he thinks to himself. 'Maybe I'm taking all this trouble to be opposed for nothing.' Other dreams follow the same pattern. A woman mocks a group of people singing political songs and then finds herself singing along. An older man is laughing at a newsreel featuring Hermann Goering in a brown leather vest, and then he himself is wearing the same vest and is being offered a job as Goering's bodyguard. One report was a simple statement: 'I dreamt I said, 'I don't have to always say No anymore.'' Beradt interprets these dreams as a side effect of what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung, or synchronizing. Germans were supposed to align their thinking with the regime and squash any inclination toward dissent. The dreams disclose a desire to succumb to this process. 'Freedom is a burden; unfreedom comes as a relief,' she writes—the most chilling line in the book. She is confident about her reading, but I'm not sure I completely follow her logic. There are at least two reasons someone would have a dream of collaboration. It's possible that the person secretly wishes to join the saluting masses, but it's equally plausible that they, more than others, are subconsciously warning themselves, preparing to put up a fight. The drive to conform is strong; it's arguably what has allowed our social species to survive as long as it has. But just as strong is the moral conscience: the worry that you won't be able to live with yourself if you violate an inner code. The realm of sleep might be the perfect place for this battle to rage, and though Beradt thinks that someone who collaborates in their dreams is probably already considering doing so in real life, they might in fact be flirting with unfreedom subconsciously as a way of relieving this particular itch and fortifying themselves. The tools of psychoanalysis could actually help here, connecting the dreamer with the shape of the dream. Freud did not deny that external stimuli could affect the subconscious. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he refers to an experiment in which an alarm clock was rung next to two sleepers. One dreams of a church bell tolling, and the other hears sleigh bells. If a patient spent enough time on the couch, the analyst could account for the difference. But because Beradt wants to read the dreams she records as straight projections of political reality, it's hard to tell whether these night fantasies about surrendering to Hitler's charms are the product of weak, susceptible minds or those sharply attuned to the moral stakes. Maybe it doesn't matter. Beradt's point is a more basic one: Authoritarianism hijacks people's brains. Her book reveals a real-time shock at how thoroughly and quickly the Nazis stormed into those deepest recesses. Sex dreams about Hitler, she hints, were not uncommon. Those actively resisting the regime kept battling and escaping Nazis when they closed their eyes. One woman who produced and distributed an illegal newspaper told Beradt about dreams of vengeance that sound like scenes from a Quentin Tarantino film: jumping from balcony to balcony, tearing down swastika flags, and stabbing her pursuers one by one. A friend of mine—an American citizen, I should add—recounted to me a dream he had last week. He was at the Canadian border and trying to reenter the United States, but was stopped by border guards. He was carrying a gun in his backpack and was about to make it through undetected, but then the guards noticed something amiss in his paperwork and decided to search him. When it became clear they were going to find the gun, he woke up in a panic. What would Beradt make of this nightmare—of the anxiety it exhibits about surveillance and authority and displacement? And what might she deduce about the atmosphere of fear and violence that inspired it? Her analysis of dreams taps into a primordial function that night visions played in human society long before Freud showed up. They were in fact treated like psychic seismographs, picking up disturbances and instability, prophecies of good fortune or doom. To know if the crops would thrive this season or what the king's death portended, premodern people turned to the subconscious as a tool for seeing beyond what was immediately accessible to them. Understood this way, dreams are perfect for registering nascent authoritarianism and the ways its repressions actually unfold: not as a single announcement or explosive act but as a steady, growing rumble while the ground beneath your feet begins to shift.
