The Third Reich of Dreams

The Nightmares of a Nation

Dunya Mikhail author Charlotte Beradt author Damion Searls translator

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Princeton University Press

Publishing:29th Apr '25

£20.00

This title is due to be published on 29th April, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

The Third Reich of Dreams cover

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.

ISBN: 9780691243511

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

144 pages