Abstract
I awoke bathed in perspiration, my teeth clenched. Once again, as on countless previous nights, I had been hunted from pillar to post in a dream—shot at, tortured, scalped. But on this night, of all nights, the thought occurred to me that I might not be the only one among thousands upon thousands to be condemned to such dreams by the dictatorship. The things that filled my dreams must fill theirs, too—breathless flight across fields, hiding at the top of towers of dizzying height, cowering down below in graves, everywhere the Storm Troopers at my heels. I began to ask people about their dreams.
So begins “Dreams under Dictatorship,” an article published by the German journalist Charlotte Beradt in 1943 in the magazine Free World. This collection of dreams was later expanded and published in book form in 1968 by Quadrangle, under the title The Third Reich of Dreams. Beradt, a Berliner, collected over three hundred dreams between 1933 and 1939. Many of her informants were afraid to speak of their dreams openly. She had to copy the dreams in code, hide them in the bindings of books scattered in her home, and send them as letters to various people in countries abroad. In 1939 she herself fled Germany and settled in New York City.
Beradt begins this extraordinary book with a dream from three days after Hitler seized power in 1933. It was reported to her several weeks later. Herr S, a factory owner in his sixties, dreamed the following: Goebbels was visiting my factory. He had all the workers line up in two rows facing each other. I had to stand in the middle and raise my arm in the Nazi salute. It took me half an hour to get my arm up, inch by inch. Goebbels showed neither approval nor disapproval as he watched my struggle, as if it were a play. When I finally managed to get my arm up, he said just five words—“I don’t want your salute”—then turned and went to the door. There I stood in my own factory, arm raised, pilloried right in the midst of my own people. I was only able to keep from collapsing by staring at his clubfoot as he limped out. And so I stood until I woke up [p. 5].
This dream haunted the manufacturer and recurred in different versions. In one, “while struggling to lift his arm, his back—his backbone—breaks” (p. 8). As Beradt writes, “In this dream, we can see how all the pressures brought to bear on the individual by the totalitarian regime produced alienation, isolation, loss of identity and dislocation. . . . In his dream Herr S felt alienated not only from all that is real in his life but also from his own character” (p. 6).
In discussing how she came to collect dreams, Beradt writes that they seemed to reveal a great deal about people’s deepest feelings and reactions as they became part of the mechanism of totalitarianism. When a person sits down to keep a diary, this is a deliberate act, and he remolds, clarifies or obscures his reactions. But . . . these dreams—these diaries of the night—were conceived independently of their authors’ conscious will. . . . Dream imagery might thus help to describe the structure of a reality that was just on the verge of becoming a nightmare [p. 9].
Just as it is impossible to summarize even a single dream, it is impossible to summarize this book, the power of which lies in the specifics of the dreams themselves. Beradt has provided a loose structure by dividing the dreams into chapters with titles such as “Private Lives Remodeled,” “Bureaucratic Fairy Tales,” and “The Everyday World by Night.” There is a section on the dreams of non-Jews who were, to their terror, dark-haired or whose noses were suspiciously large. The final section is on the dreams of Jews. However, the dreams are memorable precisely because they do not fit into any one category. Here is one more example—the dream in 1934 of a forty-five-year-old physician: It was about nine o’clock in the evening. My consultations were over and I was just stretching out on the couch to relax with a book . . . when suddenly the walls of my room and then my apartment disappeared. I looked around and discovered to my horror that as far as the eye could see no apartment had walls any more. Then I heard a loudspeaker boom, “According to the decree of the 17th of this month, on the Abolition of Walls . . .” [p. 21].
The physician’s associations to the dream included the following: “The block warden had come around to ask why I had not hung a flag at my window. I calmed him down and poured him a glass of brandy, thinking all the while, ‘Not in my four walls . . .’” (p. 21). In speaking with Beradt, he added, “Though all the elements and remarks in my dream are political in nature, I am not at all politically inclined” (p. 22). This remark may imply that the dreamer is preconsciously aware that the political dream imagery obscures more personal issues. Or it may imply that politics have forced themselves upon his mind, whatever his inclinations.
Beradt remarks on what appears to be the prescient quality of many of the dreams reported to her. Dreams from1933 and 1934 include details that were only to become reality years later—arrests, concentration camps ringed with barbed wire, broken glass. And always there is the fear of dreaming per se. One man, for instance, told her of having been reduced to dreaming only of rectangles, triangles, octagons. As he put it, “You see, it was forbidden to dream” (p. 53).
A number of dreams confided to Beradt are characterized by painfully mixed feelings. A woman who in her waking life opposed Hitler had a dream in which the experience of being singled out as special to him was pleasurable. Others dreamed, with a satisfaction that even during the dream was also horrifying to them, that they had been chosen to be Hitler’s right-hand man.
A chapter toward the volume’s end is subtitled “Destination Heil Hitler.” In dreams recounted in this section, individuals begin by protesting, but then come to see Hitler as friendlier than they had thought and, in the end, willingly obey his orders. One such “dream author . . . recognizes Hitler’s magical or pseudomagical appeal. He sees him as an animal trainer—the manipulator par excellence—and still the act comes off successfully. . . . All this throws light on the fact that people who in the beginning thought the whole show—songs, brown uniforms and upraised arms—was so funny . . . had to see the whole tragedy of the Third Reich unfold all the way to its bitter end before they could once again reject it in all honesty” (pp. 115, 119).
Beradt is explicit about what is not included in her book. She did not interview individuals who supported or benefited from the Third Reich. As she states, she did not have access to such individuals. She would certainly have had every reason to mistrust them. But she makes a virtue of necessity, claiming that she would have had little of interest to gain from their dreams. In an afterword to the book, Bruno Bettelheim expresses regret that there are no dreams from those with different political sympathies. I agree. It would have been extremely interesting to learn what went on in the sleep of those who supported Hitler. Beradt also did not include dreams about fear of physical torture or pain, which she thought might have been dreamt during any war or time of upheaval. Her aim was to show fear of thought control, of the disappearance of privacy, fear of the total state that was developing in Germany. She chose dreams that represent such terror.
The author goes to considerable lengths to downplay possible unconscious determinants in the construction of the dreams she reports. “The dreams we are concerned with were not produced by conflicts arising in their authors’ private realm, and certainly not by some past conflict that had left a psychological wound. Instead, they arose from conflicts into which these people had been driven by a public realm into which half-truths, vague notions and a combination of fact, rumor and conjecture had produced a general feeling of uncertainty and unrest” (p. 15). Understandably, she might have feared that the public—perhaps psychoanalysts in particular?—would downplay the impact of external reality on the dreams of individuals in favor of interpretations focused on private sources of intrapsychic distress. It is, however, unnecessary to discount the idiographic in order to apprehend and be horrified by the “half truths and vague notions” that “produced a general feeling of uncertainty and unrest.”
In the early 1980s, W. Gordon Lawrence, at the time joint director of the Group Relations Training Programme of the Tavistock Institute, discovered Beradt’s book referenced in a footnote. It had a powerful impact on him, serving as a major force in inspiring him to develop what he has called social—or group—dreaming. Sponsored by Tavistock, groups were developed that were designed “to associate to and interpret the potential social content and meanings of participants’ dreams” (Lawrence 1989).
Apart from Lawrence’s mention of Beradt, I have been able to locate only one paper about her book, an article by the psychologist and dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley titled “Dreaming in a Totalitarian Society: A Reading of Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of Dreams,” published in the journal Dreaming in 1994. Bulkeley expresses incomprehension at the dearth of attention to the book. In an effort to promote psychoanalytic interest in it, Bulkeley explores the book from a Winnicottian point of view. He features in particular Winnicott’s concept of transitional phenomena (1971), “the intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute . . . an area that is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated” (p. 2). In this passage and elsewhere, as Bulkeley states, Winnicott discusses the adaptive value of illusion, its heirs being play and, ultimately, cultural activity, artistic creation, the appreci-ation of art, and religious feeling. Dreaming is itself a transitional space in which we play with the relationship between inner and outer reality.
As Bulkeley states, the dreams recounted by Beradt reveal the erosion within Nazi Germany of trust, freedom, a sense of privacy—all the environmental prerequisites for the development of creative thought. Beradt describes many dreams in which inanimate objects (e.g., ovens, lamps, desks) denounce their owners to the state. A woman dreamed the following: “I was talking in my sleep and to be on the safe side was speaking Russian (which I don’t know . . . ) so I’d not even understand myself and so no one else could understand me in case I said anything about the government” (p. 52). In George Orwell’s 1984, one character, Parsons, a true believer who spouts Party slogans from morning till night, is arrested after his young daughter reports having listened at the keyhole of his bedroom door and overheard him saying “Down with Big Brother” in his sleep. In this novel, truth is so compromised that it is not self-evident that Parsons has, in fact, talked in his sleep. His daughter, encouraged to report on her parents, like all children in the fictional Oceania, may have fabricated her father’s words to gain state approval. Parsons, in any case, though frightened and miserable at being under arrest, is primarily horrified at the idea that he could have been disloyal in his sleep. He is proud of his daughter for turning him in. In any case, what the novel repeatedly underscores is the lack of safety experienced in sleeping as in waking life. Bulkeley convincingly argues that the dreams in Beradt’s book similarly demonstrate the disruption and destruction of play or transitional space wrought by a murderous totalitarian regime.
Bulkeley is genuinely struck by the ways in which Winnicott’s formulations can deepen analysts’ understanding of dreams under totalitarianism. At the same time, he has arrived at his approach partly because he wishes, as he himself states, to “draw greater attention” to The Third Reich of Dreams—and feels that a Winnicottian formulation may help in this regard.
Why hasn’t the book become better known, at least in the United States? Remarkably, over the forty-nine years since its first publication, aside from Bulkeley’s paper, it has gone virtually unrecognized. Like Lawrence, I discovered it through a footnote—in my case, in the forword by Ritchie Robertson to Joyce Crick’s 1999 translation of The Interpretation of Dreams. Beradt’s book is out of print. Over the past five years, no one to whom I have mentioned it had heard of it. Is this because, despite the fact that Bettelheim wrote the afterword, Beradt herself was not an analyst? Is it because she approaches dreams from the point of view of their social and political import? Except among Jungians, this is not the way analysts typically think about dreams; has she been sidelined for this reason? Or because she emphasizes how some of the dreams appear to forecast future horrors denied by individuals in their waking lives? Again, apart from Jungian analysts, we as a profession are un-accustomed to thinking about dreams in this way. In any event, the reasons for the book’s continuing obscurity remain unclear to me.
The Third Reich of Dreams has stayed with me since I first read it about five years ago. On November 9, the day after Donald Trump’s election as President, it came back to me. On impulse, I sent the following e-mail to a number of friends and colleagues: Dear all, During the 1930s a journalist named Charlotte Beradt, living in Berlin, began to collect the dreams of friends, relatives, colleagues relating to the Third Reich. Eventually she published these dreams anonymously in a book called The Third Reich of Dreams. Let us hope for the best from the Trump administration. Still, his election has been a shock to many and many remain fearful about what is to come. I would be interested in collecting the dreams that any of us, our patients, our friends, our relatives, may have which seem to be either directly or indirectly related to the new administration. In case any such dreams come your way and if it is all right with the dreamer, I would very much appreciate your sending them to me.
During the next several weeks, I received a number of responses. The first is the following: I have a dream to share with you. . . . The dreamer is a white female in her twenties. She is married to a woman. She dreamt a couple of nights ago that the Trump Administration banned soda pop. Although in real life she is not a drinker of soda, in the dream she was very, very upset about this and (in the dream) as she was venting this frustration, in the corner of her eye she could see her marriage license floating in the air and kind of gently drifting away from her, but she remained fixated on the soda ban.
Here is another: I did recently have a dream that was related to the election. I was late for class and was rushing. When I entered the building where my class was, I discovered that nothing was familiar to me and I had no idea where I was. I started walking up a very long flight of stairs. When I reached the top, there was a swastika painted on the wall. Then I woke up.
One dream reported to me—two months before the Muslim travel ban was ordered—had to do with airports and problems with immigration. Other dreams were about rape. The dreams of some individuals appeared to me unrelated to Trump; however, the dreamers experienced a strong connection. I sent my “dreams request” to a colleague who responded, “Every dream I hear these days is about this!”
Of course, all these dreams have latent content unconnected to current events. Nonetheless, they do provide one kind of record of our times. Of course, as well, my e-mail makes evident my own political concerns. Nor am I the only person who has remembered and chosen to review at this time a book about the Third Reich published as a cautionary tale decades ago. In the February 6, 2017, issue of The New Yorker, George Prochnik discusses Stefan Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday. The article is titled “When It’s Too Late to Stop Fascism, according to Stefan Zweig.”
“In his memoir,” Prochnik notes, Zweig did not excuse himself or his intellectual peers for failing early on to reckon with Hitler’s significance. “The few among writers who had taken the trouble to read Hitler’s book ridiculed the bombast of his stilted prose instead of occupying themselves with his program,” [Zweig] wrote. They took him neither seriously nor literally. Even into the nineteen-thirties, “the big democratic newspapers, instead of warning their readers, reassured them day by day that the movement . . . would inevitably collapse in no time.” Prideful of their own higher learning and cultivation, the intellectual classes could not absorb the idea that, thanks to “invisible wire-pullers”—the self-interested groups and individuals who believed they could manipulate the charismatic maverick for their own gain—this uneducated “beer-hall agitator” had already amassed vast support. After all, Germany was a state where the law rested on a firm foundation, where a majority in parliament was opposed to Hitler, and where every citizen believed that “his liberty and equal rights were secured by the solemnly affirmed constitution.”
In early January, I spoke with a colleague about a clinical matter. The conversation then turned to politics. He said that in truth he is not interested in politics. However, he added, recently “politics has become interested in me.” I was struck by this statement. Ordinarily, some of us are privileged enough to subjectively experience politics as an optional pursuit while those less fortunate experience themselves as the more or less helpless object of politics, whether or not they would prefer to be interested. Now, suddenly, a larger number of us appear to feel that politics has become interested in how we pursue our lives. We are confronted with choices we had not previously been forced to consider, and both our inner and our outer landscapes have shifted.
The final dream in Beradt’s collection is that of a German woman in 1960. Before her eyes, an innocuous-appearing man turns into a Nazi. This dream occurred on the same day on which she had heard a disquieting political speech. This woman is concerned not with the past but with the present, considering it “morally irresponsible to fail to recognize phenomena in the public sphere that threaten one’s freedom as a citizen—to fail to recognize them before . . . they loom large”; that, Beradt writes, was “the lesson of her fable.” The book then concludes with the following passage: This is also the lesson contained in all these fables that were dreamt during the Third Reich. They contain not only a lesson but a warning . . . that totalitarian tendencies must be recognized before they become overt—before the guise is dropped [and] before people must guard their tongues so that not even they understand what they say . . . [pp. 147–148].