Third Reich of Dreams

“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 TeethThe hidden history of a nation sleepwalking its way into evilCharlotte 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.

Charlotte Beradt (1901–1986) was a Jewish journalist and communist activist based in Berlin during the Third Reich. She fled to New York in 1939 as a refugee, creating a gathering place for other German émigrés, including Hannah Arendt. Damion Searls is an award-winning translator and writer whose translation of Jon Fosse’s novel A New Name was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi American poet whose books include The War Works Hard and The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq, which was longlisted for the National Book Award.