The Third Reich of Dreams
Description
"This is the kind of book that haunts your dreams. Essential reading for anyone who has known what it is like to live within a totalitarian state--or is worried they're about to find out."--Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth
The hidden history of a nation sleepwalking its way into evil
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. Disguising these "diaries of the night" in code and concealing them in the spines of books from her extensive library, she smuggled them out of the country one by one.
Available again for the first time since its publication in the 1960s, this sensational book brings together this uniquely powerful dream record, offering a visceral understanding of how terror is internalized and how propaganda colonizes the imagination. After Beradt herself fled Germany for New York, she collected these dream accounts and began to trace the common symbols and themes that appeared in the collective unconscious of a traumatized nation. The fear of dictatorship was ever-present. Dreams of thought control, even the prohibition of dreaming itself, bore witness to the collapse of outer and inner worlds.
Now in a haunting new translation by Damion Searls and with an incisive foreword by Dunya Mikhail, The Third Reich of Dreams provides a raw, unfiltered, and prophetic look inside the experience of living through Hitler's terror.
Product Details
| Publisher | Princeton University Press |
| Publish Date | April 29, 2025 |
| Pages | 152 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Hardback |
| EAN/UPC | 9780691243511 |
| Dimensions | 8.5 X 5.6 X 1.0 inches | 0.8 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
"As remarkable as it is timely. . . . Poetic yet astute in her analysis, Beradt holds a lens up to the collective unconscious."---Eric Miles, Vanity Fair
"What The Third Reich of Dreams charts so precisely is the insidious intimacy with which the mind's channels can be penetrated, a penetration that need not be conscious. . . . So many of the dreams [Beradt] relates revolve in fact around language, around statements overheard, statements prohibited, statements denied, statements revised in shame and terror--the language of dreams that if written down became instant contraband."---Geoffrey O'Brien, Book Post
"Beradt's book reverberates from the past into our collective psyche. . . . Princeton University Press's new edition provides a fresh foreword by the Iraqi journalist and poet, Dunya Mikhail, who was also a refugee, and a new translation by the award-winning translator Damion Searls. Searls walks a fine line between domesticating Beradt's style for a contemporary Anglophone reader and maintaining the sense of the foreignness of the familiar--of the "sur-real"--in the dreams that Beradt collects. . . . Just as the dreams in Beradt's book are remarkably prescient, already intuiting mass piles of corpses and listening devices, so too do the new edition and the eventual film land with eerie timing."---Zoe Roth, Literary Hub
"Beradt shows us why we should pay more heed to our inklings and sixth senses, gut feelings and nocturnal terrors."---Olivia Ward-Jackson, The Telegraph
"Something of a cult classic. . . . [now] reissued in a crisp new translation from Damion Searls. . . . 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."---Gal Beckerman, The Atlantic
"Damion Searls' new translation revives this almost forgotten but hugely insightful text."---Nilanjana Roy, Financial Times
"Even the greatest novelistic fabulists of human despair as byproduct of industrial-scale fascism could not have conceived of this book."-- "Literary Hub"
"Haunting. . . . a concise but powerful exploration of well-trod history that feels remarkably new."-- "Publishers Weekly, starred review"
"Haunting. . . . 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."---Willem Marx, Foreword Reviews
"Beradt offers us not a complex hermeneutics of totalitarianism but rather a quite straight forward picture of the psychological effects of propaganda and manipulation upon a populace. . . . How does one become a totalitarian subject? What--aside from the threat of violence--are the necessary conditions? These are questions Beradt's dreaming people daren't ask themselves in the cold light of day, but the queries reappear under cover of night."---Zadie Smith, New York Review of Books
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