Nearly a century before Trump’s second presidential win, in 1933, the German Jewish journalist and Communist activist Charlotte Beradt awoke, “bathed in perspiration,” from a dream in which she had been “hunted from pillar to post.” She realized she must not be the only one suffering from such dreams, and she collected over 300 of them until she was forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1939.
Many years before “bugs” became known to the public, people dreamed that normal household objects—stoves, lamps, telephones, even Easter eggs—were secretly recording them. Others dreamed in languages they didn’t know, or lost their mother tongue, or spoke only as part of a chorus, to avoid saying anything incriminating. They are the products of a totalitarian dream machine.
Beradt eventually published many of the dreams, first in German in 1966 and then in English in 1968, under the striking title The Third Reich of Dreams (Das Dritte Reich des Traums). Written in code, hidden in the spines of her library’s books, sent as letters abroad, the dreams record the disorienting psychological effects of living under “total domination.” She interweaves the dreams with a crystalline dream interpretation to create a mosaic “whose individual tesserae are pieces of the reality of the Third Reich.” Now reissued by Princeton University Press, Beradt’s book reverberates from the past into our collective psyche. In Beradt’s book, totalitarianism wears Freddy Krueger’s mask; it invades the most intimate part of the self: the unconscious.
Under this insufferable pressure, who would not want to withdraw? Soviet dissidents termed this phenomenon “internal exile.” But when totalitarianism targets our dreams there is no possibility of escape.First coined in Fascist Italy, the term totalitarianism describes a form of government that replaces democracy, liberalism, and the individual with an absolute system. Every aspect of people’s lives—their waking thoughts, what they read, who they have sex with, where they can go, and, apparently, what they dream—comes under political control. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, a clear influence on The Third Reich of Dreams, Beradt’s friend and fellow Jewish refugee, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, called totalitarianism a “sand storm” that sweeps away “the fences of laws between men,” until people are squeezed so tightly together their plurality disappears “into One Man of gigantic dimension.” Arendt elsewhere notes that in Ancient Greece, the law was quite literally a wall that protected and differentiated public and private. One of the early dreams that Beradt collected represents the destruction of privacy through a law that sweeps away walls. A forty-five-year-old doctor reported dreaming in 1934 that he was about to relax with a book after work when:
the walls of my room, of my whole apartment, suddenly disappeared. I looked around in horror and saw that none of the apartments as far as the eye could see had any walls left. I heard a loudspeaker blare: “Per Wall Abolition Decree dated the 17th of this month.”
Totalitarianism’s invasion of dreams is another way of destroying plurality (one can also see this in the similarities uniting the dreams), but on an even more compromising level, because it implicates the self’s very core. Without walls, we are naked but not intimate, close but alone.
This is what Arendt calls the “fictitious, topsy-turvy world” of totalitarianism. In the dreams, this often emerges as a fixation on the “all-encompassing fictions” that Third Reich doctrine was based on, such as its myth of racial purity. Many dark-haired, Gentile women, for instance, dream they must prove their racial status. One Jewish man dreams he sits on a trash can—having been forbidden to sit on “Aryan” benches—with a sign saying he will make way for trash. This Beckettian nightmare captures how the dehumanization of Jews as trash was a precursor to them being turned into literal waste.
Totalitarian fiction—propaganda—made into reality. (I’m reminded of a joke Arendt recounts in Origins that exposes the murderous absurdity of Nazi propaganda: “An antisemite claimed that the Jews had caused the war [WWI]; the reply was: Yes, the Jews and the bicyclists. Why the bicyclists? asks the one. Why the Jews? asks the other.”)
Totalitarianism’s fictitiousness is not creative. It demands uniformity. The book’s first dream records the psychological price such compliance exacts. Mr. S dreams that Goebbels visits his factory. While all his employees easily perform a Seig Heil salute, Mr. S tortuously struggles to raise his arm millimeter by millimeter, only to have Goebbels reject his salute and march out. Mr. S is paralyzed by the need to conform in front of his workers, many of them life-long Social Democrats like himself. Yet his compliance produces a profound sense of alienation.
In this way, “The Dream of the Raised Arm,” as Beradt titles it, encapsulates the aesthetics of fascism. This aesthetics is not (or is not only) mass rallies and grand performances—what Susan Sontag called “history become theatre” in her analysis of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will. Aesthetics, understood vis-à-vis the original term aesthesis, is also what pertains to sensory perception. “The Dream of the Raised Arm” identifies the essential sensory experiences of totalitarianism: paralysis, inertia, apathy, alienation, atomization, compliance, loneliness, and loss of identity.
More than terror, the overriding affect of totalitarianism is anaesthesia. We see this in Mr. S’s tortured but eventual conformity, which internalizes the Nazi concept of Gleichschaltung, literally “synchronization.” It is a term taken from engineering to mean coordinating electrical circuits, and it describes the Nazification policy of bringing all political, cultural, and civic realms into line with National Socialism, such as bringing universities to heel.
We see this apathy in another dream, where anaesthetic conformity is etched on the “mute and expressionless faces” that watch the dreaming woman being arrested while watching a play. Her crime? Associating Hitler with the word “devil,” which has been detected by a “thought-reading machine.” The theatre here is not a grand stage of totalitarian power. Instead, it represents, as Beradt describes, “the atmosphere of total indifference created by environmental pressure and utterly strangling the public sphere.” The Latin root of compliance means a physical response to force—what happens to a bodily organ under applied pressure. Another woman dreams she has become covered in lead: “my fear will go away when I’m all lead,” because “leaden people can’t rise up.”
These dreams are terrifying because they capture “the creation of the submissive totalitarian subject,” Beradt writes. She is clearly drawing on Arendt’s definition of “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule,” who is not the ideologue, but rather “people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” Totalitarianism’s invasion of dreams dissolves these distinctions. This totalitarian subject not only conforms outwardly to fascism’s (often absurd laws and rules), but embodies this compliance in how she moves, the words she thinks, and what she dreams.
The ideal totalitarian subject turns herself into lead so as not to be able to rise up against. Another woman manufactures inertia in a dream about how it is illegal to write down any math, while a man dreams only in abstract triangles, squares, and octagons. (This prohibition on a fact-based reality anticipates a Veep episode in which a hapless former White House aid is elected on an “anti-math” platform.) The ideal totalitarian subject able to think (and dream) only in concrete, yet absurd images that do not represent a meaningful reality.
Under this insufferable pressure, who would not want to withdraw? Soviet dissidents termed this phenomenon “internal exile.” But when totalitarianism targets our dreams there is no possibility of escape. Gleichschaltung brings the unconscious—the self’s most ungovernable part—into line, and in doing so empties the individual of creativity, vitality, and, most importantly, resistance.
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The Third Reich of Dreams has had a circuitous journey to recognition that mirrors Beradt’s life. Dispersed and split apart by WWII, the book’s dreams were reunited as Beradt reached New York and found exiled refugee friends, including her first husband and Heinrich Blücher, Arendt’s husband (and Beradt’s former lover). She and her husband became part of a growing circle of German Jewish emigres. Here, still unable to speak and write English well and devoted to her ailing husband, Beradt worked as a hairdresser. It is easy to imagine how the journalistic skills that once induced people to divulge their dreams now stood her in good stead in the confessional space of the “salon” (in both senses of the word).
Many Americans see Trumpism as a revelation, just as many Germans believed that Hitler woke them from their slumber. But we should remember the Biblical roots of Revelation, or apokalypsis, meaning both to lay bare and to herald the end of the world.Gradually, from the 1950s Beradt began to write again. Encouraged and helped by Arendt, she published the book in Germany and then in the United States, where it found a receptive audience. This was the height of the Cold War and anxieties about totalitarianism still ran deep, though they were mostly focused on the perceived threat of a global Communist revolution. But as Beradt grew older, The Third Reich of Dreams’ chilling message began to feel anachronistic in Reagan’s new “American morning.” It was reissued several times but found only a limited readership. Beradt died in 1985.
Princeton University Press’s new edition provides a fresh foreword by the Iraqi journalist and poet, Dunya Mikhail, who was also a refugee, and a new translation by the award-winning translator Damion Searles. Searles walks a fine line between domesticating Beradt’s style for a contemporary Anglophone reader and maintaining the sense of the foreignness of the familiar—of the “sur-real”—in the dreams that Beradt collects. The British filmmaker Amanda Rubin, who shepherded the book to its current iteration, is also translating it in a visual form into a documentary. (Rubin provided me with biographical research on Beradt for this piece.) Just as the dreams in Beradt’s book are remarkably prescient, already intuiting mass piles of corpses and listening devices, so too do the new edition and the eventual film land with eerie timing.
In Trump’s America, a life without walls has been replaced with “flood the zone,” a tactic of mass distraction that overwhelms people’s nervous systems and attention spans with an infinite stream of shit (to use Steve Bannon’s term). This deluge of shit picks up everything in its midst, from the adolescent trolling of naming a government department after a meme coin to the detainment of a permanent US resident for exercising free speech.
Many Americans see Trumpism as a revelation, just as many Germans believed that Hitler woke them from their slumber. But we should remember the Biblical roots of Revelation, or apokalypsis, meaning both to lay bare and to herald the end of the world. This double meaning is reflected in the aesthetics of fascism, which are leaden, anaesthetic, but also absurd. Indeed, the compliance and the absurdity amplify each other, such as the man who dreams of Hitler as a “death-bringing clown” dressed in sparkly purple trousers. Despite these absurd details, the dreams of compliance lack imagination. Beradt collected over a dozen dreams about being BFFs with Hitler, Goering, or Goebbels. Who will rise up now?
The Third Reich of Dreams is a reminder that Gleichschaltung starts with the capitulation of our internal worlds, such as the man who dreamed that “I don’t have to always say No anymore.” Totalitarianism targets dreams because, as the expression of our unconscious—both individual and collective—they are the seat of creativity. I am reminded of the historian Timothy Snyder’s exhortation: “Do not obey in advance.” This means, more than ever, that we cannot anaesthetize ourselves.
