Cling to that Strangeness
On The Third Reich of Dreams
Sarah Dowling
A couple of years ago, I received a notification that the poet Zoe Tuck was teaching a class on dreams at the Poetry Project in New York City. The reading list featured numerous poets and translators I admire, as well as another text I didn’t recognize: The Third Reich of Dreams, by Charlotte Beradt; I decided to look it up. It was originally published in German in 1966, and the 1968 translation by Adriane Gottwald, though reissued in 1985, was long since out of print. Within a few minutes, I’d found a PDF of the full text. I was immediately engrossed.
So began a minor obsession with Beradt and her unusual project, which has recently been retranslated by Damion Searls, and published anew by Princeton University Press. A journalist, Beradt gathered the dreams of some three hundred people in her Berlin neighborhood from 1933-39, when she fled the country. Her process of recording dreams was clandestine: “I asked the dressmaker, the neighbor, an aunt, a milkman, a friend, almost always without revealing my purpose.” Beradt also gathered second- and third-hand dreams with the help of others, including “a doctor who had access to a wide range of patients.” Many people were reluctant to divulge their dreams, fearing incrimination. Beradt, who had been caught up in the mass arrests that surrounded the Reichstag fire, and who was also Jewish, feared this too. She wrote the dreams down on small pieces of paper, using a kind of code to conceal their subversive elements: “Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels [became] Uncle Hans, Uncle Gustav, [and] Uncle Gerhardt”; an “arrest” became a case of the “flu.” At first, she hid the dreams within the spines of her own books, but after searches of private homes and book burnings became common, she mailed them to friends around the world for safekeeping.
Beradt lived in Charlottenburg, a comfortably middle-class suburb of Berlin with a significant Jewish population. None of her dreamers were “enthusiastic supporters of the [Nazi] regime,” nor were they “people benefitting from it.” But most of them weren’t particularly active in opposing it either. She gives a few examples of dreamers whose loved ones were arrested, or who were involved in “producing and distributing an illegal newspaper.” But the majority are simply normal—that is to say, apolitical—people. What their dreams document is the crushing pressure to assent and conform, the shame of compliance and complicity. Witness one “relatively unimaginative, conservative” woman schoolteacher’s dream from 1933:
It was forbidden under penalty of death to write down anything to do with math. I took refuge in a bar (never in my life have I been to such a place). Drunks were swaying on their feet, the barmaids were half-naked, the band was cacophonous and deafening. I took an extremely thin sheet of paper out of my bag and wrote down a couple of equations in invisible ink, deathly afraid.
Obviously, this dreamer found her own dream unsettling. But Beradt’s flat, presentational style ensures that we are amused by the contrast between the dowdy middle-aged teacher and her dream of nudie barmaids and too-loud music. Beradt leans into the comic disjunction, even suggesting that the equation the teacher scribbled in secret might have been “2 x 2 = 4.”
This is not done in a spirit of mockery. In fact, Beradt points out that the math teacher behaved “like an expert spy,” and that her dream of furtive mathematics clearly reveals all “the other prohibitions”—the real ones—“that strain against impossibility.” She then includes a parenthetical aside: “[T]his math teacher’s dream contained one of the very few acts of resistance, no matter how timid, that turned up in any dream by any member of the middle class.” The humor is instructive: It reveals the absurd proscriptions and rules, the cowardice of the comfortable citizens who won’t speak out, and the apparent impossibility of stating a simple truth—even in invisible ink, and even in the hidden realm of dreams.
“In fact, so clear and true are the dreams that Beradt argues against the idea that one must interpret them at all.”
Beradt’s book presents about seventy-five of the dreams she collected, most in a similar style: many begin “I dreamed that I was,” or “I was,” or “I went.” Others, as with the math teacher’s dream, start by establishing some condition or setting: “It was Sunday at the Tiergarten park,” “There was a dance taking place,” “It was a sunny day.” The shortest dreams are only a sentence or two long, and the longest are generally no more than a couple of spare paragraphs. Some are framed as extraordinary; others are described as representative of a broader trope or type. Usually, Beradt includes only a couple of words to introduce the dreamer, and she doesn’t submit the dreams to much overt analysis, either. She often confines her remarks to affirmations of the validity of the dreams’ observations: “this dreamer understood perfectly,” and that dream was “perfectly true.” The images from one dream are “fully convincing in their purity and clarity,” while another woman’s dreams are described as “objectively accurate.”
Sometimes Beradt attributes a visionary, quasi-predictive power to the dreams. For example, she presents a pair of dreams from a man introduced only as “an eye doctor, forty-five years old”—nothing more to note about this ordinary professional. Here is the first:
The storm troopers were putting barbed wire into the hospital windows. I had sworn I would never allow them to bring their barbed wire into my ward. But then I did allow it after all; I stood there like a caricature of a doctor as they knocked out the glass and turned my hospital room into a concentration camp with barbed wire—and even so, I lost my job. But I was summoned back to treat Hitler, because I was the only one in the world who could; I was proud of myself for that, and felt so ashamed of my pride that I started crying.
Beradt provides a more fulsome analysis of this dream and the one that followed immediately after it, when the eye doctor fell back to sleep. Together, they receive three paragraphs of discussion: the first is devoted to the eye doctor’s complicity; the second discusses a pun on the word “barbed wire” in German (Stacheldraht), which he struggles to remember in the dream. The third paragraph, which is the kicker that concludes the chapter, explains that the story the dream told “took place in real life years later—Kristallnacht, 1938.” The details of the actual event “almost seem to have been taken from this eye doctor’s dream,” which he experienced four years earlier. What still seemed impossible in the moment when the dreams were dreamed was in fact “well on its way to becoming reality.” In Beradt’s view, the sleeping doctor understood what no one could yet know—this is the unusual power of dreams, and this is why she thought them worthy of recording.
In fact, so clear and true are the dreams that Beradt argues against the idea that one must interpret them at all. She explicitly distances her project from “psychological theories”: “no one needs to explain [the] symbols” or “interpret [the] allegories—at most, we might have to decode some simple ciphers.” And yet she likens the dreams to art and to literature, comparing the dreamers and their nocturnal creations to Kafka, Shakespeare, Orwell, Bréton, Huxley, Dostoyevsky, Brecht, Nietzsche, and Plutarch; she frames her discussions of them with epigraphs from Eliot, Heine, Goethe, and the Book of Job, among other texts. While describing the dreams of an “unemployed, liberal, cultured, rather pampered” woman, Beradt enthuses that although this woman was “a perfectly normal person in daily life, she proved herself in her dreams to be the equal of Heraclitus’s sybil, whose ‘voice reached us across a thousand years.’”
*
In a short piece on the French translation of The Third Reich of Dreams, published in 2002, the psychoanalyst Michelle Moreau Ricaud provides some crucial biographical information on Beradt that is difficult to access elsewhere (although a documentary about her is currently in production). Charlotte Beradt, née Aron, was born in 1901, in a small town called Forst, near the German-Polish border.[1] Along with her well-off parents, she moved to Berlin as a small child. After finishing her schooling, she began an apprenticeship at a publishing house, Fisher Verlag, but soon left, feeling exploited. Instead, she became a typist for the writer and lawyer Martin Beradt, and embarked on her own career as a journalist, writing short articles covering social issues and health. She married a fellow journalist, Heinz Jakob Pollack, in 1924. Together, they joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and translated one of Charlie Chaplin’s books. The couple separated in 1928; they were each arrested in 1933 in circumstances surrounding the Reichstag fire and the Fire Decree. Pollack (who had changed his name to Heinz Pol years earlier) fled to Prague. He and Beradt divorced. Beradt remained in Germany—even though she was legally barred from journalism, she hoped to serve in some way as a witness to and “counterweight” against the Nazi regime. At some point amid all this chaos, she moved in with Martin Beradt. A romance ensued, or perhaps it was rekindled. The Beradts married, then left for London in the summer of 1939. After waiting several months for visas, they went on to the United States the following year, and settled in New York City, where they both lived for the rest of their lives. Martin died in 1949, and Charlotte, who was a couple of decades younger, died in 1986.
In New York, Beradt was ensconced within a community of other refugee intellectuals from Germany—she was particularly close with Hannah Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blücher, who was Beradt’s former lover. However, she had a much more difficult transition into the North American intellectual milieu than did many of her peers. Her husband was extremely unwell, and her spoken and written English were not strong. She worked, from her own small apartment, as a hairdresser. As the literary critic Zoë Roth notes, “it is easy to imagine how the journalistic skills that once induced people to divulge their dreams now stood her in good stead” in this new career. Her clients were mostly other exiles—some were minor luminaries, like the writer and painting-subject Bella Chagall. It cannot have been easy to get by.
Like every other aspect of her life, Beradt’s database of dreams had to be rebuilt entirely following her emigration. The cryptic little stories about “Uncle Hans” or so-and-so getting the “flu”—as many as could be recovered—slowly made their way back to her from wherever they had ended up. But the dream project also had to be submitted to the more pressing work of caretaking and survival, and Beradt had to figure out whom she could even address, what audiences might be receptive to her compendium of ordinary people’s dreams. In 1943, she managed a short English-language publication, “Dreams under Dictatorship,” in the New York antifascist magazine Free World; in 1965, she took part in an episode devoted to the dreams for West German radio.
With significant help and encouragement from Arendt, Beradt slowly brought her book to completion, publishing it some 26 years after her arrival in New York. Given all the difficulties that she faced, it’s not surprising that The Third Reich of Dreams is quite short: Gottwald’s 1968 translation clocks in at only 148 pages, followed by an essay on the text by Bruno Bettelheim. Searls’s new translation is only 122 pages, not including the foreword by Iraqi American poet Dunya Mikhail. The current German edition, published in 2016, is 173 pages—this includes its afterword by Barbara Hahn.
The book is divided into eleven brief chapters that move from a general description of the collection and compilation of the dreams to roughly thematic discussions of dreams of different kinds: “Life Without Walls,” “I Don’t Enjoy Anything Anymore,” “The Dark-Haired in the Reich of the Blond,” and so on. Beradt says that she has excluded all the bloody and frightening dreams of physical violence, but one man dreams of his back being broken, and there are quite a few instances of objects being smashed and of slaps. The final chapter purports to consider “Jewish Dreamers.” At first, this might suggest that Jewish dreams are marked off, considered separately from the rest. However, this is not quite what plays out: in the early chapters, dreamers are typically identified only by their profession: “the owner of a mid-sized factory,” “one forty-five-year-old doctor,” “a fifty-year-old math teacher,” “a lawyer and civil servant in the city government,” “a middle-aged housewife,” “a greengrocer.” But it is often suggested or stated, though usually not right off the bat, that some of these dreamers are Jewish.
As the book continues and the dreamers become more and more concerned about their associations and appearances—how they are perceived by others and classified by law—Beradt abruptly begins to identify some of them according to mathematical proportions of Jewish ancestry. Whereas in the earlier chapters, she sometimes made reference to a dreamer’s Jewish parent or grandparent, in the tenth chapter she uses the terminology of the Nazi race laws, describing one young woman as a “newly minted ‘25% mixed breed,’” and another as a “‘50% mixed breed.’” As her quotation marks suggest, this is not an endorsement of the Nazis’ legal classifications; it is a demonstration of their effects. Much as the earlier chapters discuss the dreams of Jewish people, typically identifying them at first according to some other descriptor, the chapter devoted to “Jewish Dreamers” similarly contains the dream of a woman who was “not herself Jewish, but married to a Jewish man and so bound up with the fate of the group.” The structure of the book records and contests the tightening grip of the Nazi race laws; it corresponds to an atmosphere of increasing persecution and evanescing rights. It documents how these laws sheared through a population, splitting, distinguishing, and ranking its members.
“Beradt demonstrates that all night, every night, we challenge and change reality. She calls upon us to cling to that strangeness so that we can continue in the work of transformation…”
Beradt’s insistence on the evidentiary value of the dreams, on their capacity to represent or testify to a reality so real that it is not even fully grasped, makes her book a bit challenging to classify. Despite its population-sampling methods, it is not social science and, as I mentioned earlier, Beradt specifically distances her work from the psy- disciplines. I think this is why artists like it—The Third Reich of Dreams wears its form on its sleeve. In its presentational style, its database logic, and in the sense that emerges through its careful sequencing, its form feels significantly contemporary. It makes me think of Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, a book of prose poetry that obliquely examines the partition of India and Pakistan by asking an unspecified group of people to answer prompts like “Describe a morning when you woke without fear,” or “Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?” Of course, Beradt is not writing poems.
While German historians received The Third Reich of Dreams as an important document for understanding everyday life in the 1930s and as a spur to the practice of conceptual history, Anglophone and Francophone readers have been more confused, if they have engaged the book at all.[2] As the psychoanalyst Frances Lang noted in 2017, her review of the book was only the third commentary from an English-speaking psychoanalyst in 50 years.[3] When introducing the book to French readers, Moreau Ricaud suggests that Beradt’s collection process is best understood as an anti-Nazi project, or even as a communist one. She notes that Beradt likens the dreams to a seismographic record, tracing the tremblings of a loose collective. But this description prompts her to pose a sequence of questions whose obtuse cruelty is truly stunning: why did it take Beradt so long to publish her work? Why didn’t she think to submit her database as evidence for the Jerusalem Nuremberg trials? Why didn’t she seek to share what she had collected with those who were trying to rekindle psychoanalytic practices in Germany?
Yes, one certainly wonders: Why didn’t this struggling refugee hairdresser simply contact the International Court of Justice to share the scraps of paper that comprised her stalled-out study of things that did not happen in reality? Why didn’t this uncredentialed woman simply contact Germany’s leading psychoanalysts to help kickstart a discipline she wasn’t part of in the country from which she had been exiled?
Are these utilitarian metrics the most appropriate ones for evaluating The Third Reich of Dreams? In her introduction, Beradt says how glad she is that it took so long for her book to be completed. During the decades that elapsed between her dream-collecting and the book’s publication, “a substantial firsthand record—facts, documentation, testimony—became available,” enabling a more ready appreciation of “the immediate effects of total domination on its individual subjects.” The new Searls translation, which does a wonderful job of conveying Beradt’s humor and actually had me laughing aloud on several occasions, has arrived at a moment when readers seem eager to think about fascism and its effects. Indeed, the book has been favorably received, with reviews in the TLS and LitHub, excerpts published in Harper’s and The Paris Review, and so on. This new translation, viewed through the lens of Searls’s astonishing literary career, brings Beradt’s own artistry more fully into view. Perhaps it is part of the salutary process of taking-so-long that Beradt felt was beneficial to the reception of her work.
The recent reviews and excerpted publications, as positive as they are, also tend to jump to problematic comparisons. In a kind of inversion of Moreau Ricaud’s bizarre dismissal, they insist on a contemporary relevance grounded in what a presumptively American readership is experiencing under Donald Trump’s administration. I have no doubt that in their dreams, Americans are examining and expressing the ways in which their country is becoming ever more repressive. I’m sure this is even truer of the dreams of people who live in the United States under compromised or attenuated claims to citizenship or rightful residency. In fact, the writer and therapist Martha Crawford has been gathering dreams about Trump on and off since 2016, inspired in part by Beradt’s book. The reviews of Searls’s translation that I have seen do not discuss this. Instead of putting The Third Reich of Dreams within a lineage, they respond only to its basic premise. Grasping at timeliness, they neglect to consider what Beradt does with the materials that she collected, how she structures and presents the enormous archive that she initially gathered—or however much of it she ever got back.
Slim as it is, The Third Reich of Dreams is a kind of magnum opus. Beradt’s process began in 1933, the book appeared in 1966, and she gave talks about it as late as 1980—this is truly a life’s work. No wonder artists like Tuck have kept the grainy PDFs circulating; no wonder Searls felt called to retranslate the book; no wonder that Mikhail agreed to write the introduction. Beradt is astonishingly deft in her deployment of form and structure; she is highly attentive to the work of genres like propaganda, myth, and fable. Her book documents a brutal destruction, but it also holds together the community that was, that shuddered in its sleep at its own hidden knowledge. The Third Reich of Dreams is a testament to the perceptiveness, intelligence, and creativity of ordinary people. It is also a text that is at peace with its own strangeness. Beradt demonstrates that all night, every night, we challenge and change reality. She calls upon us to cling to that strangeness so that we can continue in the work of transformation—not just unwittingly, in our sleep, but even, and more importantly, once we are awake.
[1] Moreau Ricaud draws on biographical information summarized for her by Teresia Ruhl-Obermeyer, who in turn is drawing on Kirsten Steffen’s 1999 book Haben sie michtgehasst? Antworten für Martin Beradt (1881-1949), Schriftsteller, Rechtanwalt Berliner Jüdischen Glauben. Moreau Ricaud states that Beradt was born in 1901, but all the other sources I’ve consulted give 1907 as her birth year. Michelle Moreau Ricaud, “Charlotte Beradt: La passeuse de rêves sous le régime nazi,” Tropique 3, no. 96 (2006): 115-124, https://doi.org/10.3917/top.096.0115.
[2] See Reinhardt Koselleck’s “Afterword to Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of Dreams” in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts,” translated by Todd Samuel Presner, 327-39. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
[3] Frances Lang, “Book Review: The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation, 1933-1939,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 65 No. 4 (2017) 742-750.