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The Third Reich of Dreams

The Nightmares of a Nation

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The Third Reich of Dreams

By: Charlotte Beradt, Damion Searls - translator, Dunya Mikhail - foreword
Narrated by: Olivia Vinall
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About this listen

This audiobook narrated by Olivia Vinall exposes 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, The Third Reich of Dreams provides a raw, unfiltered, and prophetic look inside the experience of living through Hitler's terror.

©2025 Charlotte Beradt (P)2025 Princeton University Press
20th Century Europe Judaism Military Modern Political Science Politics & Government Dream Holocaust

Critic Reviews

"Haunting. . . . An astonishing historical analysis, The Third Reich of Dreams speaks to the dreams of those who lived under Hitler to capture the twisted realities of Nazi rule."—Willem Marx, Foreword Reviews (Willem Marx)
"Beradt created a unique document that illustrates, profoundly, how people gird themselves, consciously and unconsciously, for the great moral tests they know are coming, even as they absorb and interpret the shocking curtailments of freedom to their daily lives. . . . I must return to Bettelheim, who raises the essential question at the end of his essay: 'If all of us abhorred the Third Reich, why did it exist? […] Even among those who lived in fear and trembling of the Nazis, might there not have been in them somewhere, deep down, a layer of soul closely kin to that regime of terrible domination?' The answer is being written as we reread, with fear and trembling, the work of Charlotte Beradt."—Laurie Winer, Los Angeles Review of Books (Laurie Winer)
"Beradt shows us why we should pay more heed to our inklings and sixth senses, gut feelings and nocturnal terrors."—Olivia Ward-Jackson, The Telegraph (Olivia Ward-Jackson)
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