The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation

In this spare but haunting compendium, originally published in 1966 and newly translated by Searls, journalist Beradt (1907–1986) questions everyday Germans in the 1930s about their dreams, which they relay to her in interviews or provide her in written accounts. Beradt presents these records—“not diaries but nightaries, you might say”—along with her own commentary, which points to astonishing patterns in the dreams of disparate people at different ends of the political and social spectrum. She sorts their dreams into categories, most notably “bureaucratic atrocity stories,” in which dreamers do not, or are helpless to, resist the creep of fascism, and, opposingly, the dreams of “active doers” who resisted “the schizophrenic nature of totalitarian reality” both in waking and dreaming life. Beradt gathered her dream material until 1939, when she—as a Jew, a communist, and a journalist—fled the country herself. Her research demonstrates how thoroughly the rise of fascism—a “distorted, distorting environment” of “disintegrating values”—infected the minds of those who lived through it, while maintaining a probing focus on the choice between acquiescence and resistance. It’s a concise but powerful exploration of well-trod history that feels remarkably new. (Apr.)