Bureaucratic Atrocities
Book review
Charlotte Beradt. The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of A Nation. Translated by Damion Searls. Foreword by Dunya Mikhail. Princeton University Press, 2025.
Princeton University have commissioned and published a new translation of Charlotte Beradt’s classic Dasse Dritte Reich des Traums (Munich, 1966). Philip Best enters the dream machine.
This is one of my favourite books. 75 dreams in 11 chapters. Collected from her friends and neighbours by Charlotte Beradt (a Jewish “Progressive”, as Dunya Mikhail’s foreword would have it), before she married a lawyer and hotfooted it to New York (via London) in 1939. Sometime in the mid-1960s Beradt retrieved the transcripts and published extracts, along with her commentary, and a select group of accompanying literary quotations (Brecht, Orwell, Kafka and the like). Kafka looms large here. Only his own pathetically ill health prevented him perishing at the appointed time (his three sisters were murdered in 1942 at Chelnmo and Auschwitz). Did Kafka dream of the coming time? I think so, yes. But in a sense it was always that time.