The Third Reich of Dreams

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 neighbours, 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 internalised and how propaganda colonises 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 traumatised 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.

"A strange, enthralling book. . . . The Third Reich of Dreams is a collective diary, a witness account hauled out of a nation’s shadows and into forensic light."---Mireille Juchau, The New Yorker
"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
"[A]n extraordinary clandestine project. . . . A new English edition, translated with crisp clarity by Damion Searls, revives this long-overlooked classic. . . . Beradt’s nocturnal diaries, vivid snapshots of collective unease, belong to a specific time and place. Her book’s involuntary testimonies are dictated, so to speak, by a particular dictatorship. But in our own moment of renewed anxiety about authoritarian impulses worldwide, they make us wonder: What happens when the dreams are no longer fully our own? The least we can do is read this singular document with our eyes wide open."---Benjamin Balint, Wall Street Journal
"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
"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
"Haunting. . . . a concise but powerful exploration of well-trod history that feels remarkably new." Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Even the greatest novelistic fabulists of human despair as byproduct of industrial-scale fascism could not have conceived of this book." 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
"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
"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
"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
"Newly translated, the remarkable collection—which is unique in the canon of Holocaust literature—may now find more readers. It arrives at a time when people are more interested in the connection between sleep and well-being than ever before." The Economist

Charlotte Beradt (1907-1986) 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 emigres, 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.

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