Review: Geoffrey O’Brien on ”The Third Reich of Dreams”

A journalist, prompted by her own troubled sleep, starts gathering dreams in 1933

“I began to collect the dreams that the Nazi dictatorship had as it were dictated”: this is how Charlotte Beradt (1901–1986) describes the subversive and dangerous project she undertook in 1933. A Jewish journalist and Communist Party member, she had been barred from publishing soon after Hitler’s ascent to power, but managed to survive under the new regime until she was able to get out of Germany in 1939. During those six years, prompted initially by her own troubled sleep, she sought out accounts of people’s dreams—gathered from “the dressmaker, the neighbor, an aunt, a milkman, a friend”—compiling a secret archive that became the basis for The Third Reich of Dreams, published in 1966, and now newly translated by Damion Searls.

Her book is quite the contrary of a psychoanalytic treatise. She is concerned not with the dreamers’ personal history and inner conflicts, but with the incursion of external forces. Citing as epigraph a dictum of the Nazi official Robert Ley to the effect that in the new Germany no one has a private life except when asleep, she observes that this was in fact an understatement: in her compilation of dreams she finds them tracing outer realities “as minutely as a seismograph.” The fragmented episodes she retrieves are reassembled into a counter-history of all that, in a newly muted society, could not be spoken or acknowledged.