Between 1933 and 1939, when she left Germany, the writer and translator Charlotte Beradt collected over 300 dreams from friends, acquaintances, and strangers impacted in one way or another by living in Nazi Germany. In the 1960s she published a small book (really just a long essay) on how these dreams demonstrate that the Nazi state so totally dominated the lives of Germans that it impinged on people’s most hidden, inner dream life.
The dreams evidenced the truth of Hannah Arendt’s definition of totalitarianism (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951), where totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and in Communist Soviet Union was distinguished from traditional dictatorships and from authoritarian states. That Nazi Germany affected one’s dreams clearly showed that totalitarianism is different from mere authoritarianism.
In the 1980s, the book was translated into English. https://psptraining.com/wp-content/uploads/charlotte-beradt-the-third-reich-of-dreams-the-nightmares-of-a-nation-19331939.pdf. Two months ago, Princeton University Press issued a new, and I think better, translation: The Third Reich of Dreams | Princeton University Press .
While Beradt’s take on the dreams depends on Freudian dream interpretation — on his emphasis on anxiety and wish-fulfillment as unconscious sources of dreams — Beradt’s understanding is much more literary than psychoanalytic. In psychoanalysis, the interpretation of the dream’s meaning is a dialogue between patient and analyst, dependent on flexible interchanges of that relationship. In addition, the meaning of a dream is surrounded by the patient’s and analyst’s shared knowledge of the patient’s life history, especially the early years during identity formation. Here, Beradt’s dreams are stripped of the identity or any real knowledge about the dreamer. Some of these dreams are not even told to Beradt but second or third hand versions.
In fact, they are free-floating stories circulating in the form of dream narratives. As such, Beradt treats them as fables, as tiny works of an unconscious imagination, as works of literature. “In the darkness of the night they reproduce in distortion,” she says, “all they had experienced in that sinister daytime world.” Her literary touchstones are Kafka’s parables and the literature of totalitarianism: Aldous Huxley’s prescient Brave New World (1932), the post-war George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949), and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953). She understands that dreams are ways in which we manage unconsciously our multifaceted, conflicted, and ambivalent emotions in everyday life.
Thus, she divides her demonstration of total political domination into ten themes or types of dreams, from the loss of individuality and the loss of self-understanding, from the self as a ridiculous anti-hero to the desire to join the choir, from the anxiety of looking different, from assertion of heroic resistance to the attraction of erotic resistance, from hidden wish fulfilment to openly willed wish fulfillment, to dreams of being Jewish.
But finally, it is the dreams themselves that matter, their surprise at the sudden world change, their terror and fear, their sense of powerlessness, of shameful compliance, of self-degradation, of pain at being excluded, of rebellion and impotence. Some are very short: “I was telling a forbidden joke, but as a precaution, I was telling it wrong, so that it didn’t make any sense at all.” Some are long, continuous, multi-episode dreams. And, like all dreams, they are enigmatic, filled with a strange kind of emotionless emotion.
A successful factory owner, politically active in the Social Democratic party, dreams that Goebbels (Nazi propagandist and district chief of Berlin) visits his factory where the workers are lined up in two rows facing each other with the dreamer in between. He tries desperately to raise his arm in the Nazi salute but is only able to move excruciatingly slowly. Dripping with sweat, he finally gets his arm up after half an hour, and Goebbels after watching the struggle, walks off after saying, “I don’t need you to greet me.” The factory owner stands there with uplifted arm, in front of his people, staring at Goebbel’s club foot as he walks out the door. He stays that way until he wakes. It’s a dream he dreams over and over.
A nice looking 22-year-old girl with a prominent nose dreams that she goes to an Aryan Proof Office and hands in her grandmother’s identity papers. The receptionist is a marble statue sitting behind a stone wall. She takes the papers and tears them to shreds which she throws into a furnace built into the wall. She asks the girl, “From now on, are you still Aryan?”
An eye doctor dreams that the Storm Troopers are going around putting barbed wires over the windows of his hospital. He swore that he would not allow that in his ward, but when they come he just stands by, looking like a cartoon doctor, while they tear out the glass and turn his ward into a concentration camp. Still, he is fired. But then they call him back to treat Hitler because he is the only one in the world who can do it. He is proud but is so ashamed of his feeling of pride that he starts crying. At that, he wakes from his dream and thinking a long time about it decides that the source of his dream was that one of his assistants had come to work that day wearing a Storm Trooper uniform, and he hadn’t objected. The doctor falls asleep again and dreams that he is in a concentration camp where life is quite pleasant, there are dinner parties and theater productions. He thinks how exaggerated the stories of concentration camps are when he happens to see himself in a mirror. He is wearing the uniform of a camp doctor and has on high boots that sparkle like diamonds. He leans against the barbed wire and again begins crying.
A 33-year-old housewife dreams that she is in a large, dark movie theater and feels anxious because she shouldn’t have been there, the place being reserved for party members. Then Hitler appears, and she is even more frightened. But he allows her to stay, and even more, he sits down next to her and puts his arm around her shoulders.
A 21-year-old student at business college dreams that they are celebrating something called National Unity Day on a train. In the dining car, there are long rows of men sitting at long tables. She sits at a little table. A political song they sing sounds so funny, she starts laughing. She moves to another table but has to laugh again. That didn’t help, so she gets up intending to leave the car, but then it dawns on her that maybe if she sings along, it wouldn’t seem so funny. So, she sings along.
A young man dreams that he only dreams of rectangles, triangles, and octagons which all looked like Christmas cookies because it is forbidden to dream.
Beradt’s book is worth reading and worth understanding.