Things Still to Be Salvaged

Laurie Winer assesses Damion Searls’s new translation of “The Third Reich of Dreams: Nightmares of a Nation” by Charlotte Beradt.

By Laurie WinerJune 26, 2025

• History

VIRTUALLY ANYONE who spends significant time researching genocide has experienced recurring dreams of being hunted by a relentless, all-powerful enemy. Such nightmares may well be a biological and categorical imperative: if dreams help prepare us for the world, then nightmares would be appropriate (on a personal note, I have learned over the years—and I remain agog—that lots of people don’t have these dreams).

What does one do when one’s country is on the precipice of a great and terrible change? How does one brace for the rapid stream of restrictions and demands from an authoritarian regime? Immediately upon Adolf Hitler’s ascent in January 1933, Charlotte Beradt, a 25-year-old Berlin Jew and freelance journalist, conceived for herself a brilliantly original way to document the transformations around her—she would write down the dreams of her friends and acquaintances, all of whom were paying close attention to the new chancellor’s every move. And because their dreams were so intense, Beradt’s subjects said, they could remember every detail.

And so it was that Beradt created a unique document that illustrates, profoundly, how people gird themselves, consciously and unconsciously, for the great moral tests they know are coming, even as they absorb and interpret the shocking curtailments of freedom to their daily lives.

Before she left Germany in 1939, Beradt collected about 300 dreams, including some from an analyst who related those of his patients. Since she was already known to the police (she’d been briefly arrested as a communist after the Reichstag fire), her project put her at greater risk, and she hid her work in the bindings of books. She moved with her husband to New York in 1940, and for a time, dyed the hair of other expats. Eventually, she turned back to literature, translating essays by her friend Hannah Arendt and editing a collection of Rosa Luxemburg’s letters. It was only in 1966 that Beradt published her work, in German, which included about 75 dreams along with her commentary on them. An English translation followed in 1968, with commentary by Bruno Bettelheim. This year, Princeton University Press has smartly brought out a new edition, translated by Damion Searls and replacing Bettelheim with an introduction by Dunya Mikhail, an Iraqi poet who fled her country in 1995. Beradt draws a number of fascinating conclusions from the dreams, which she divides into categories functioning as chapters. One is devoted to the dreams of assimilated Jews; another to non-Jews who fear that, because of their dark hair or large noses, they will be mistaken for Jewish; one to those taking part in some kind of active resistance; and, most interesting, people who, unbeknownst to their conscious minds, are rehearsing their inevitable capitulation to the Nazi’s demands. In Beradt’s words, these are the folks most dramatically “in the process of transformation.”

Take, for instance, the seamless succumbing of an older man who dreams he’s watching a newsreel of Hermann Göring, who’s wearing a brown leather vest and firing arrows from a crossbow. The dreamer sees Göring as a ridiculous figure, but suddenly he finds himself standing next to the sybaritic Nazi and wearing the same vest and holding the same crossbow, and now he is Göring’s bodyguard. Beradt relates another dream from a young man, who, in his reverie, is taking his day off. Feeling defiant, he decides not to take the required donation box for the Nazi cause, instead bringing just a blanket and pillow. He travels to the Berlin Zoo stop on the metro. Hitler is there, wearing the sparkly purple satin pants of a clown, and speaking to groups of children, then teenagers, then older ladies. The man, lying under his blanket, fears he’ll be taken for one of those people “who pretend to be asleep.” Next, Hitler sings an aria, is applauded, and races downstairs to get his coat, where he waits patiently at the cloakroom for his turn. “Well, maybe he’s not so bad,” thinks the dreamer. “Maybe I’m taking all this trouble to be opposed for nothing.” He looks down at his pillow and blanket and sees, instead, he is carrying the collection box. Reading these and other dreams like it, one senses the unremitting need to be freed from an impossible moral conundrum.

Then there are dreamers with a more naked wish to be accepted and even desired by Hitler or one of his men. A transportation worker dreams that, just as he is about to be beaten up by storm troopers, Hitler arrives and says, “Leave him alone, he’s just the man we want with us.” An older woman who describes herself as being anti-Nazi and who frequently dreams about Hitler and Göring reports, “He wants something from me, and I don’t say ‘But I’m a respectable woman,’ instead I say ‘But I’m not a Nazi,’ and that makes him like me even more.” A housewife dreams she is sitting outside at a long table when a tailcoated Hitler appears with a big bundle of flyers that he’s handing out. At first she thinks he’s ignoring her, but then he comes to her, hands her a flyer, and, she recalls, “with his other hand he stroked my hair and then stroked farther down my back.” These fantasies fulfill the more rhapsodic wish of becoming a chosen one, of being enveloped in protection.

In her commentary, Beradt frequently invokes Franz Kafka; how could she not? She’s collected dreams of extraordinary eloquence, many that have the grace, economy, and prescience of the writer. The poetic imagery in an office worker’s dream conveys being caught between two equally overwhelming and contradictory desires: to object and to remain safe. In the dream, having decided to file a formal complaint against the “prevailing circumstances,” he sits ceremoniously at his desk. There he takes a blank sheet of paper, “with not a single word on it,” and seals it in an envelope, feeling proud of himself and at the same time “deeply ashamed.” The same man dreams also of calling the police to make a complaint, but when someone answers, he says not a word.

I was personally interested in the places in which German dreamers attempt to hide. One young woman tries to cover herself in lead (interestingly, her tongue has already turned to lead). She tells herself that once she has turned entirely into the element, her fear will cease. Often, dreamers pick extremely high or low places in which to shelter. Beradt herself dreamed she was hiding atop a tall tower, and then cowering below ground in a grave. A doctor describes a dream in which “now that the apartments are totally public, [he’s] living on the bottom of the sea in order to remain invisible.” Others tuck away on treetops or in a restaurant cupboard. One woman hides herself and her genealogy papers under a pile of dead bodies, feeling “pure bliss” because she’s found safety (the corpse image, she said, came from a description of Khartoum, Sudan, after the Mahdist Revolt).

For obvious reasons, passports and visas take on overwhelming significance for the dreamers. Another leitmotif is the expression on the face of each onlooker as the dreamer is arrested or humiliated: descriptions include “vacant,” “mute and expressionless,” “empty,” “impassive,” and “with not a single face showing even any pity.”

Not surprisingly, the dreams of people who were in some way working with the resistance were more action-filled, less surreal and claustrophobic, than those who did nothing while they wondered what would happen next.

Beradt’s work has been devalued at times, partly because she was neither an academic nor an analyst, partly due to the garden-variety sexism of reviewers, and partly because of its own flaws. When the book debuted in English in 1968, newspaper reviewers said things like “her rather amateurish approach to her material limits the significance of her book” (The Atlanta Journal) and, unobservantly, “the author is not a professional historian but he has done his work well” (The Boston Globe).

Reviewing a 2002 French edition of the book, the neurologist and psychologist Joseph Gazengel wrote a long, thoughtful essay on Œdipe, a forum that showcases the writing of psychoanalysts. He notes that he appreciates the importance of the book and sees it as part of a trilogy with Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness (1975) and Victor Klemperer’s The Language of the Third Reich (1947). He writes of Beradt’s “ardor, her originality and her dynamism.” But even as he praises, Gazengel must demean:

Let us note in passing that the author never fails to situate the dreamer in a few words, indicating to us with a lively and precise stroke, not only his social position but also his convictions, his commitments, his temperament, his attachments to the people around him and whom he loves. Let us also note that she takes into account the dreamer’s comments after his story and the interpretation he gives of his dream. She has worked very well, little Charlotte!

Gazengel also shows his hand with the dubious claim that Beradt “has a mechanistic and castrating representation of Freudian interpretation.” However, he makes a fair point when he concludes that, “in fact, she has an exclusively political aim that she wants to protect from any scratch.” Similarly, he says that Beradt’s book “required a theoretical legitimacy that was a priori problematic.” I think I see what he means. Because of the urgency of her cause and her lack of credentials, Beradt feels she must prove what she doesn’t have to prove, at least not so relentlessly—that fascism seeps into every crevice of life and robs citizens of privacy or any place to recover and retrench.

This didactic impulse results in sentences both unwieldy and unnecessary. When a man dreams that he is being prosecuted for saying that he doesn’t enjoy things anymore, Beradt writes: “If ‘enjoying things’ is the non-goal-oriented pleasure a person takes in being alive, then the crime of being unable to enjoy anything stands for dehumanization in a world fenced in by ideologies and controlled by a goal-directed dictatorship.” In another spot, she explains that one dream “adds new details that are insights into the fact that emphasizing natural differences, creating artificial ones, defining elite groups and inhuman groups and then playing one off against the other are basic principles of totalitarian regimes.” But, on the other hand, these flaws are by-products also of her individuality and her inventing a book unlike any other.

One understands why she asked Bruno Bettelheim, an Austrian-born psychologist and scholar, to supply an essay for the book’s first English translation. Bettelheim came to prominence with his 1943 paper “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,” one of the earliest firsthand accounts of the concentration camps. At the time Beradt approached him, he was best known for his work on child psychology, and he had yet to pen his most influential works, which include The Uses of Enchantment (1976), Freud and Man’s Soul (1982), and A Good Enough Parent: A Book on Child-Rearing (1987).

Bettelheim, a man who had been imprisoned in Dachau and Buchenwald, opens his essay by saying he found Beradt’s book “shocking.” He was struck by how “the sensitivity of Jewish people particularly was so heightened by the acute threat under which they lived, that their dream imagery is marked by a clairvoyance that is almost naturalistic.” Another reason for his shock is that his experience of dreaming in the camps was notably different. Beradt’s subjects believed, he notes, that “there are still things to be salvaged,” and they had “not yet suffered real extremity.” In the camp, the dreamer “had no further reason to fear what might happen to him. It had already happened.” Now the only thing that mattered was staying alive, so at night inmates were left “reassuring themselves that the nightmare of the camps was not permanent,” and thus they dreamed “of the good times they had or were going to have.”

New times, apparently, require new commentary, if for no other reason than Bettelheim’s tarnished reputation (among other controversies, after Bettelheim’s 1990 suicide, a journalist uncovered evidence of mistreatment of adolescents in his care at the Orthogenic School in Chicago). For her part, Dunya Mikhail handles with grace the unenviable task of situating the Nazi era for those who may not be all that familiar. She also reminds (or alerts) young readers that Beradt’s book is “strikingly relevant” and “incredibly timely,” as “not just a historical inquiry but a stark warning about the enduring nature of totalitarian tactics and their ability to permeate even our most intimate thoughts and fears.” Pay attention, oh ye of little history.

Still I must return to Bettelheim, who raises the essential question at the end of his essay: “If all of us abhorred the Third Reich, why did it exist? […] Even among those who lived in fear and trembling of the Nazis, might there not have been in them somewhere, deep down, a layer of soul closely kin to that regime of terrible domination?” The answer is being written as we reread, with fear and trembling, the work of Charlotte Beradt.