The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation
by Charlotte Beradt, translated from the German by Damion Searls, with a foreword by Dunya Mikhail.
Princeton University Press, 124 pp., $24.95 (to be published in April 2025)
Born in 1907 in Forst, Germany, a town near the Polish border, Charlotte Beradt was a young journalist who reported on women’s issues and other aspects of German social and political life for the weekly journal Die Welt bühne. In 1933 Beradt, a committed communist and a Jew, found herself suddenly unemployed. As the Nazi movement grew, she began having nightmares every night.
She wondered whether other people were having similar dreams. She started to ask people about their dreams, discreetly: “I asked the dressmaker, the neighbor, an aunt, a milkman, a…