The Third Reich of Dreams

The Nightmares of a Nation

Charlotte Beradt, Damion Searls

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9780691243504, 9780691243511
• eBook ISBN: 9780691243528
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

“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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Dunya Mikhail
• 1. How This Book Came to Be
• 2. Remaking the Individual, or “Life Without Walls”
• 3. Bureaucratic Atrocity Stories, or “I Don’t Enjoy Anything Anymore”
• 4. The Everyday Life of Nighttime, or “So That I Wouldn’t Understand Myself”
• 5. The Non-Hero, or “Said Not a Word”
• 6. The Chorus, or “There’s Nothing We Can Do”
• 7. Ideas Come to Life, or “The Dark-Haired in the Reich of the Blond”
• 8. Active Doers, or “You’ve Just Got to Decide You Want To”
• 9. Veiled Wishes, or “Destination: Heil Hitler”
• 10. Undisguised Wishes, or “He’s the Man We Want with Us”
• 11. Jewish Dreamers, or “I’ll Make Way for the Trash If Needed”
• Notes
• Index