Dreamlike representations could contribute to the interpretation of the structure of a reality that soon turned into a nightmare. I began to collect dreams born under the influence of the dictatorial regime. The undertaking was by no means easy, considering the fear of some to entrust me with their dreams. In five or six instances, I even heard the phrase articulated almost verbatim: "Dreams are forbidden, yet I dream."

From 1933 to 1939, the German-Jewish journalist Charlotte Beradt, a later friend and translator of Hannah Arendt, collected dreams from German citizens, Jews and non-Jews, who, like herself, lived under the reality of the early Third Reich. She then cryptographed them and, after hiding them in her library, mailed them abroad, from where she retrieved them after 1939, when she herself fled to New York. In her book, Beradt presents and comments on the recorded dreams, raising the question of whether sleep was truly a private matter under the Nazi regime.

The dreams of the collection thus acquire the character of a historical source and narrate life under the permanent threat of terror, sometimes seeming to draw inspiration from the dark images of Kafka and at other times foreboding the nightmare of Orwell's Big Brother and the Brave New World.

The dreams in the collection demonstrate the extent to which the totalitarian regime of the Third Reich was capable of exerting control over the citizen, considering that even during sleep, when one is supposed to be alone with oneself, terror and propaganda invaded one's dreams either openly or insidiously to crush them. However, above all, the author seeks to understand and explain how an entire nation could accept, align with, and cooperate with a regime fundamentally based on terror and violence – a regime under which the sole option for survival is to align oneself with it, even when dreaming.

Reading the collection of dreams compiled by Charlotte Beradt, we feel shocked by the effectiveness with which the Third Reich killed sleep, destroying a person's ability to restore their emotional strength through dreams.

— BRUNO BETTELHEIM From the Afterword of the edition

Excerpts from the book: The Nazi leader who said that one has privacy only in sleep in Germany undoubtedly underestimated the capabilities of the Third Reich. In the course of total subjugation, the individual who speaks on the following pages to narrate their dreams saw things more clearly "in dreams, in nocturnal visions."

"Since houses have ceased to be private spaces, I live at the bottom of the sea to remain unseen."

"Around nine in the evening, just after I finish my practice and while preparing to lie down on the couch and relax with a book about Matthias Grünewald, I suddenly see the walls of the room in my apartment collapsing. I look around in horror to discover that all the apartments, as far as the eye can see, no longer have walls. From some loudspeaker, I hear a horrible voice saying: 'According to the decree of the 17th of this month, regarding the abolishment of walls.'

The bedside lamp next to another housewife's pillow also becomes a informant; instead of illuminating the room, it brings to light, with deafening loudspeaker intensity, what she murmured in her sleep: 'The harsh voice of the lamp reminds me of an officer. My first thought is to turn off the light and wrap myself in the saving darkness. But then I tell myself: "Futile effort." I run to my girlfriend, anxiously leaf through her dream interpretation book, but the only interpretation I find for the word "lamp" is "serious illness." For a moment, I feel a tremendous relief; immediately, however, it comes to mind that in our days, people use "illness" as a code word for "arrest." I sink back into black despair, resigned to the mercy of the persistent harsh voice, although there is no one to arrest me."

The specific dream stories indeed shed light on the terror, but at the same time serve as a means of enacting the terror itself. All the stories recount experiences that shake the depths of human existence, becoming recipients of an inner truth that was not only confirmed but vastly surpassed by the subsequent reality of the Third Reich.

BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS

CHARLOTTE BERADT (née Aron) was born on December 7, 1907, in the town of Forst in Brandenburg. She grew up in Berlin as the daughter of a German-Jewish merchant. She took her first steps in journalism writing for German newspapers and political reviews. From the early 1930s, she regularly contributed articles to the political and cultural review Die Weltbühne, which hosted the cream of the leftist German intellectuals. She was a member of the German Communist Party (KPD), from which she withdrew in disagreement with its shift towards Stalinism. After Hitler's rise to power, she was banned from practicing journalism. In 1939, she fled with her German-Jewish husband, lawyer and writer Martin Beradt, to London and then to New York.

After the war, she was allowed to write again for the West German press. Following her husband's death, she engaged with his literary legacy while simultaneously connecting with Hannah Arendt and translating five of her political essays into German. Das Dritte Reich des Traums (The Dreams in the Third Reich - could also be translated as "The Third Empire of Dream") was her first book, published in 1966 in Germany. The author had begun collecting the material since 1933, when she still lived in Germany.

In 1969, Beradt published the biography of the leftist German-Jewish politician Paul Levi, a founding member of the KPD and its president from 1919 to 1921, who later disagreed with the leadership and returned to the SPD. That same year, she edited Levi's literary work, and in 1973, she published the correspondence of Rosa Luxemburg with her secretary and friend Mathilde Jacob. Until her old age, she remained an active journalist. She also worked in translation and theater criticism, and from 1962 to 1978, she edited and presented the radio program Diaries. She died in 1986 in New York.

The role played by her in the film Hannah Arendt (2012) was portrayed by Austrian actress Victoria Trauttsmansdorf.

COVER WORK: GOYA The sleep of reason produces monsters, from the Caprichos series.