Book cover of The Third Reich of Dreams

Book description

"This is the kind of book that haunts your dreams. Essential reading for anyone who has known what it is like to live within a totalitarian state-or is worried they're about to find out."-Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth

The hidden history of a nation sleepwalking its way into evil

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Why read it?

2 authors picked The Third Reich of Dreams as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This was my gateway book to the politics of dream life.

An incredible example of the ways dreams can provide another way of seeing reality—and indeed, how they can sometimes offer a clearer view of what is happening than any conscious narrative can.

I’ve read many accounts of the moment when Hitler came to power, but somehow this collection of dreams gathered by a Berlin-based journalist in 1933 manages to offer the most vivid account of what it felt like to live through this moment. These dreams convey the emotional force of the Third Reich, unlike anything else. 

Dreams often reveal as much as, if not more, about a person, time, or place than objective eye-witness accounts. In this chilling collection of the nightmares of some 300 fellow Berliners under the Nazi regime, Jewish Berlin-based journalist Charlotte Beradt sounded the depths of the insidious effects of a dictatorship on the minds of those in its dominion and their stubborn refusal to comply. The English language edition includes an essay by child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, in which he remarked upon the potency of a totalitarian state, "forcing its enemies to dream dreams that showed that resistance was impossible &…

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