The Third Reich of Dreams

The Nightmares of a Nation

Charlotte Beradt, Damion Searls, Dunya Mikhail , Dunya Mikhail

$53.95

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Princeton University Press
06 August 2025

History; The Holocaust; Jewish studies; Psychology: emotions

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 preface by Dunya Mikhail, The Third Reich of Dreams provides a raw, unfiltered, and prophetic look inside the experience of living through Hitler's terror.

By: Charlotte Beradt
Preface by: Dunya Mikhail, Dunya Mikhail
Translated by: Damion Searls
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm,
ISBN: 9780691243511
ISBN 10: 0691243514
Pages: 152
Publication Date: 06 August 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Charlotte Beradt (19071986) 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 migrs, 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.

Reviews for The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation

""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