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 (1907–1986) 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.

Many of her informants dream of social situations—on the street, in factories and shops, sporting events and school rooms—where nightmarish crises arise without eliciting any response from the bystanders, reflecting what Beradt describes as an “atmosphere of total indifference… utterly strangling the public sphere”: “The faces didn’t even show scorn or contempt.” “They all just stared straight ahead.” “An icy silence reigned.” The inner recesses of the mind are now invaded territory where nothing can be concealed. One person dreams that dreams have been forbidden and that therefore one can only dream of “rectangles, triangles, and octagons.” A man writes down a dream in which he is accused of writing down his dreams. Another dreams of a “life without walls” in which he must go to the bottom of the ocean to avoid being seen. A woman hides under a pile of dead bodies, in one of many prefigurations of things yet to come.

The surrealism of the sleeping mind becomes eerily realistic amid a reality poisoned by the regime’s toxic caricatures and distortions. Beradt notes the extent to which these dreams are infiltrated by the instruments of state propaganda—“loudspeakers, banners, posters, headlines”—now thoroughly internalized. Imaginary bureaus of control emerge, the “Telephone Surveillance Office” or the “Training Bureau for the Installation of Eavesdropping Devices in Walls.” A student forced to break up with her Jewish boyfriend sees him, in a dream, as a bloodied skeleton before reassuring herself (still within the dream) that “this is just propaganda … an anti-Hitler poster.”

Beradt arranges her book into virtual subgenres defined by a range of responses: denial, capitulation, escape, resistance, despair. These sleepers, as she sees it, are looking for solutions to unbearable pressures. The solution may be pure paradox: someone employs blind and deaf people to spy on forbidden things, in order to prove if apprehended that nothing forbidden could have been revealed. At other times there are virtual rehearsals for submission: “I dreamed I said: ‘I don’t have to always say No anymore.’” An initially resistant dreamer ends by joining in a political anthem or saying “Heil Hitler” to a bus full of passengers.

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Hitler inevitably haunts these dreams, often in the guise of fantastic wish fulfillment. A housemaid is fearful because she has entered a movie theater where only Party members are allowed, but Hitler sits next to her and puts his arms around her. After the imposition of the Nuremberg race laws, a woman dreams she meets Hitler on a ship and admits that she is part Jewish: “He looked very nice, not at all like he usually does, with a round, pleasant, kind face.” A Jewish doctor dreams he has cured Hitler: “I was the only person in the Reich who could.” A man who sees Hitler dressed as a lion tamer—making “exaggerated gestures meant to impress the audience” while singing an aria from an opera called Magika—concludes that “maybe he’s not so bad… Maybe I’m taking all this trouble to be opposed for nothing.”

The effect is choral, but it is of course a chorus arranged with patient deliberation by Beradt, who hid these dreams in the spines of books and smuggled them out of Germany piece by piece, and, when she was in the clear, settled in New York in the 1940s, constructed a book whose resounding force is accentuated by its brevity. In a domain of maximum oppression, dreams can provide a true description. Treating those dreams as events so close to waking that they can figure as episodes in a history, interweaving them with her own commentary, Beradt creates a unique kind of memoir. Claustrophobia and fear seep into every object, every ordinary incident—when inside and outside could no longer be differentiated, “ordinary everyday incidents were not just ordinary.” In weighing the significance of each detail, she reads dreams not as hermetic but as shared experiences, shared through the eroding of borders by systematic coercion and a systematic violence already sensed if not, for these dreamers, as yet arrived.

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. It recalls an equally indispensable memoir, Victor Klemperer’s The Language of the Third Reich. Klemperer, a Jewish scholar who survived all twelve years of the regime, describes how the Reich created a language of its own, coining new jargon and changing the meaning of old words, making every statement potentially a loyalty oath, so pervasively and effectively that its usages became inescapable even for its victims and targets: “At some point the printed lie will get the better of me when it attacks from all sides and is queried by fewer and fewer around me and finally by no one at all.” Beradt likewise notes how propaganda can “infiltrate the people it’s directed at, until here too the boundaries … gradually dissolve, and suggestion becomes autosuggestion.” So many of the dreams she 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.

In case you missed it: In Sunday’s Notebook editor Ann considers the current “digital book burning” of documents and data, and the vision of history that it serves.

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Geoffrey O’Brien’s most recent book is Arabian Nights of 1934, which we featured last year. He is the author of many and varied works of nonfiction, including Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears, The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the Twentieth Century, Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows: Writing on Film, Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir, and nine books of poetry. He has written for Book Post about Robert Bresson, Marvin Gaye, S. J. Perelman, Raymond Queneau, Agnès Varda, and the bookstores of Paris.

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