Скачать или смотреть “The Third Reich of Dreams” Book Talk

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 foreword by Dunya Mikhail, The Third Reich of Dreams provides a raw, unfiltered, and prophetic look inside the experience of living through Hitler’s terror.

Join the Museum of Jewish Heritage for a discussion of this book with Amanda Rubin.

Over the past three decades, Amanda Rubin has directed and produced documentaries on cultural history, music, the arts, and science. These have been featured on BBC, Channel 4, The History Channel, and Discovery+, among other notable channels.

She is currently developing a new film, The Third Reich of Dreams, with Snowstorm Productions. This animated drama tells the story of Charlotte Beradt (1907-1986), a Berlin-based journalist who collected the dreams of her Jewish and non-Jewish friends and neighbours during Hitler’s rise to power.

Based in London, Amanda works actively to share the story and the importance of the book The Third Reich of Dreams. In addition to working on the documentary about the book and its author Charlotte Beradt, which will be released in 2027, a radio documentary for BBC 4 has also been commissioned on the story of Charlotte Beradt’s extraordinary and subversive dream project with a gripping struggle of ideas – between external and internal freedom, between the control of public and private space and the nightmare when the two are no longer quite distinguishable.