28/05/2026
The journalist Charlotte Beradt started collecting people's dreams once Hi**er took power, until she herself fled the country for the United States. In New York, she published her work, titling it "The Third Reich of Dreams: the Nightmares of a Nation." It has recently been republished by Princeton University Press.
At one point in the book she states "When, in the imaginary Reich of Dreams, it is no longer the Third Reich's concrete practices that provoke dreams but the all encompassing fictions (the "theories") the regime is based on -- when fantastic doctrines occasion a dream, rather than terror tactics, prohibitions, legal paragraphs, or any other factual basis -- then the whole dream becomes a parable of the schizophrenic nature of totalitarian reality."
She then cites some dreams showing that the "constantly repeated propaganda slogans are effective; they are also a metaphor for everything imaginary, fictive, and artificial in the totalitarian reality."
In one dream she talks about at this point, a 22 year old woman with a dramatically curved nose believes that everyone thinks she is Jewish. Her dreams were "full of noses and identity papers, papers and noses." The dream:
"I went to the Office of A***n Verification (which doesn't exist under this name....) and handed in a certificate about my grandmother that I had spent months chasing down. The official, who was sitting behind a wall and looked like a marble statue, reached his arm up over the wall, took the certificate, tore it to pieces, and burned the pieces in a little stove built into the wall. "So, are you still pure A***n now?"
For Beradt, dreaming in "the language used by the persecutors" was a sign that N**i messaging was reaching the German public, who were tacitly absorbing them into the individual / national psyche as valid truths. The dreamer is beginning to define themselves by the irrational and oppressive N**i structure and terminology, a kind of psychological co-option, no matter what side of it you are on, into the larger totalitarian system.
Image: an illustration from a 1930s N**i children's book where students in school are learning the supposed differences between "A***ns" and Jews.
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