Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of Dreams is a groundbreaking work of historical and psychological reportage that provides a unique lens on life under Nazi rule by collecting and analyzing the dreams of ordinary Germans between 1933 and 1939. As Hitler rose to power and the machinery of totalitarianism took hold, Beradt—a Jewish journalist in Berlin—found herself plagued by nightmares of persecution and flight. Realizing she was likely not alone, she began to secretly gather the dreams of others, ultimately amassing over three hundred accounts from a wide cross-section of Berliners: doctors, milkmen, students, lawyers, manufacturers, housewives, Jews and non-Jews alike1567.
The book is not simply a collection of nightmares, but a profound anthropological and psychological study of how a totalitarian regime invades the deepest recesses of the human mind. Beradt’s informants described dreams that reflected the surreal and terrifying new reality imposed by the Nazis. These nocturnal visions were often not of direct violence, but of humiliation, surveillance, and the collapse of private life. For example, one factory owner dreamed of being forced to salute Goebbels for half an hour, only for Goebbels to dismiss the gesture as unnecessary, highlighting the absurdity and arbitrariness of power1. Another recurring motif was the fear of even dreaming—several people reported dreams in which it was forbidden to dream at all, a chilling metaphor for the regime’s attempt to control not just actions and speech, but thoughts and desires themselves26.
Beradt’s methodology was necessarily clandestine. As a Jew banned from working and living under constant threat, she disguised these “diaries of the night” in code and hid them in book spines to smuggle them out of Germany. She and her husband eventually fled to New York in 1939, joining a circle of exiles that included intellectuals like Hannah Arendt26. In exile, Beradt began to organize and interpret the dreams, identifying common symbols and anxieties that revealed the psychological impact of Nazi propaganda and repression. The dreams, she argued, served as a kind of seismograph, registering the internal effects of external political events with uncanny precision5.
The book is structured thematically, with dreams grouped under headings such as conformity, the loss of privacy, and the longing for belonging. Beradt intersperses the dream narratives with her own commentary, drawing connections to broader studies of totalitarianism and the works of thinkers like Arendt and Brecht1. The result is a mosaic of the collective unconscious—a record of how terror, suspicion, and propaganda seeped into the most intimate spaces of daily life. In one particularly haunting dream, a young girl’s guardian angels transform into informants, their eyes no longer gazing heavenward but fixed sharply on her, a symbol of the omnipresent surveillance and betrayal that characterized the era5.
One of Beradt’s key insights is that the Nazi regime’s power lay not only in its ability to coerce and punish, but in its success at colonizing the imagination. The dreams she collected often featured the language of Nazi decrees, slogans, and propaganda, showing how these messages were internalized and regurgitated even in sleep5. In one case, a doctor dreamed that as he tried to relax with a book, the walls of his room vanished in accordance with a fictional “Wall Abolition Decree,” illustrating the erasure of boundaries between public and private life5.
The Third Reich of Dreams thus stands as both a historical document and a warning. It offers a raw, unfiltered look at how ordinary people internalized the terror and absurdity of dictatorship, and how even the unconscious mind can become a battleground for political power167. Through its haunting testimonies, Beradt’s book illuminates the psychological costs of living under totalitarianism and the ways in which fear and repression can shape not just behavior, but the very fabric of thought and dream.