Here are 100 books that The Third Reich of Dreams fans have personally recommended if you like
The Third Reich of Dreams.
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The American-born son of Jewish refugees, I would have every reason to revile the erstwhile capital of The Third Reich. But ever since my first visit, as a Fulbright Fellow in 1973, Berlin, a city painfully honest about its past, captured my imagination. A bilingual, English-German author of fiction, nonfiction, plays, poetry, travel memoir, and translations from the German, Ghost Dance in Berlin charts my take as a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in a villa on Wannsee, Berlin’s biggest lake, an experience marked by memorable encounters with derelicts, lawyers, a taxi driver, a hooker, et al, and with cameo appearances by Henry Kissinger and the ghost of Marlene Dietrich.
Charting the interactions of various low-life characters in a stream-of-consciousness collage, tracing the city’s restless pace, Berlin Alexanderplatz, a novel by Alfred Döblin, published in 1929, mines the underbelly of the seething metropolis bursting at the seams. Considered by many to be one of the modern masterpieces of 20th-century literature, the novel follows the peregrinations of Franz Biberkopf, a pimp just out of prison, and his interactions with his erstwhile love interests and various shady associates. Döblin presents his protagonist as a kind of Everyman. I swear I encountered Biberkopf’s reincarnation in a homeless derelict crooning the German version of Sinatra’s “I Did it My Way” at an outdoor karaoke arena.
The great novel of 1920s Berlin life, in a new translation by Michael Hofmann, translator of Alone in Berlin
Franz Biberkopf is back on the streets of Berlin. Determined to go straight after a stint in prison, he finds himself thwarted by an unpredictable external agency that looks an awful lot like fate. Cheated, humiliated, thrown from a moving car; embroiled in an underworld of pimps, thugs, drunks and prostitutes, Franz picks himself up over and over again - until one day he is struck a monstrous blow which might just prove his final downfall.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I love stories about “pilgrimage.” I have always been an admirer of those characters who search, whether in fiction or nonfiction. I respect their steadfast endurance to undertake a calling, meet unforeseen obstacles, and overcome insurmountable circumstances, while never allowing the burning flame that drives them to extinguish.
My own memoir, Drummer Girl, is the story of my pilgrimage. I have the distinct memory of traveling through a dark tunnel toward a clear light during surgery as a child. This experience of near death has since driven me to seek understanding, to look for words when there were none, and to find solace through life’s many turns.
I often give it as a gift to those of all ages. My favorite line is “Goodbye,” said the fox. “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
The story of the little prince poignantly reminds us that on the path to self-discovery, we must stay open to the question, look beyond what is visible, and remain inquisitive; in other words, we must remember to live in the mystery. This is a great message for adults and children alike.
The Little Prince is a timeless tale and a classic metaphorical story about the pilgrimage to find one’s true self.
Few stories are as widely read and as universally cherished by children and adults alike as 'The Little Prince'. Richard Howard's new translation of the beloved classic-published to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's birth-beautifully reflects Saint-Exupery's unique and gifted style. Howard, an acclaimed poet and one of the preeminent translators of our time, has excelled in bringing the English text as close as possible to the French, in language, style, and most important, spirit. The artwork in this new edition has been restored to match in detail and in colour Saint-Exupery's original artwork. By combining the new…
I am a professor of visual studies from Canada who has always been interested in dream life—although I’ll admit, it took me a long time to treat this domain as a serious research topic (sometimes the somberness of the academy can impede more adventurous pursuits). I created the Museum of Dreams as a place to explore the social and political significance of these visions, which has led to amazing collaborations with institutions, communities, and individuals around the world. I hope this list has inspired you to attend more closely to your own dreams!
This book was my survival guide for facing a serious illness.
I learned so much from the way this self- described “Black lesbian feminist mother lover poet” remade herself in the process of recovering from cancer. Lorde is a prophet of radical transformation. And one of her key tools was her dreams.
She taught us that change comes from looking inward and by giving voice to what one finds there. And the book contains one of the most amazing dreams I’ve ever read: near the end of her life, Lorde dreamt she wanted to take a course in “language crazure”: the study of “the formation and crack and composure of words.”
Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy.
A Penguin Classic
First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a startling, powerful account of Audre Lorde's experience with breast cancer and mastectomy. Long before narratives explored the silences around illness and women's pain, Lorde questioned the rules of conformity for women's body images and supported the need to confront physical loss not hidden by prosthesis. Living as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Lorde heals and re-envisions herself…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
The American-born son of Jewish refugees, I would have every reason to revile the erstwhile capital of The Third Reich. But ever since my first visit, as a Fulbright Fellow in 1973, Berlin, a city painfully honest about its past, captured my imagination. A bilingual, English-German author of fiction, nonfiction, plays, poetry, travel memoir, and translations from the German, Ghost Dance in Berlin charts my take as a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in a villa on Wannsee, Berlin’s biggest lake, an experience marked by memorable encounters with derelicts, lawyers, a taxi driver, a hooker, et al, and with cameo appearances by Henry Kissinger and the ghost of Marlene Dietrich.
In Berlin Stories, the book that inspired the movie Cabaret, comprising two linked novellas by Christopher Isherwood loosely based on his first-hand experience as an expat in Berlin in the Twenties, the British novelist evokes the anything-goes atmosphere that reigned in the capital of the Weimar Republic immediately prior to the Nazi take-over. That free-wheeling, raucous spirit survived the Third Reich and still thrives in Berlin today.
First published in the 1930s, The Berlin Stories contains two astonishing related novels, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin, which are recognized today as classics of modern fiction. Isherwood magnificently captures 1931 Berlin: charming, with its avenues and cafes; marvelously grotesque, with its nightlife and dreamers; dangerous, with its vice and intrigue; powerful and seedy, with its mobs and millionaires-this is the period when Hitler was beginning his move to power. The Berlin Stories is inhabited by a wealth of characters: the unforgettable Sally Bowles, whose misadventures in the demimonde were popularized on the American stage and…
The American-born son of Jewish refugees, I would have every reason to revile the erstwhile capital of The Third Reich. But ever since my first visit, as a Fulbright Fellow in 1973, Berlin, a city painfully honest about its past, captured my imagination. A bilingual, English-German author of fiction, nonfiction, plays, poetry, travel memoir, and translations from the German, Ghost Dance in Berlin charts my take as a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in a villa on Wannsee, Berlin’s biggest lake, an experience marked by memorable encounters with derelicts, lawyers, a taxi driver, a hooker, et al, and with cameo appearances by Henry Kissinger and the ghost of Marlene Dietrich.
Kurt Tucholsky’s books were among the first to be banned and burned by the Nazis. And with good reason. A Jewish journalist of a left-leaning bent with a tart tongue and an acid wit, Tucholsky, who "wanted to stop a catastrophe with his typewriter," as per his contemporary, Erich Kästner, represented everything the Nazis sought to eradicate. Tucholsky tapped the anarchic spirit of 1920s Berlin just as painter Georg Grosz captured its bloated, pock-marked face. Berlin! Berlin! Dispatches from the Weimar Republic contain a representative sampling of Tucholsky’s pithiest texts. A forerunner of flash fiction, his concise writing style, and tongue-in-cheek tone are harbingers of new journalism and among the many influences on my own writing.
Berlin! Berlin! is a satirical selection from the man with the acid pen and the perfect pitch for hypocrisy, who was as much the voice of 1920s Berlin as Georg Grosz was its face. It shines a light on the Weimar Republic and the post-World WarI struggle, which fore¬shadowed the Third Reich. Kurt Tucholsky was a brilliant satirist, poet, storyteller, lyricist, pacifist, and Democrat; a fighter, lady's man, reporter, and early warner against the Nazis who hated and loathed him and drove him out of his country. He was a "small, fat Berliner," who "wanted to stop a catastrophe with…
The American-born son of Jewish refugees, I would have every reason to revile the erstwhile capital of The Third Reich. But ever since my first visit, as a Fulbright Fellow in 1973, Berlin, a city painfully honest about its past, captured my imagination. A bilingual, English-German author of fiction, nonfiction, plays, poetry, travel memoir, and translations from the German, Ghost Dance in Berlin charts my take as a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in a villa on Wannsee, Berlin’s biggest lake, an experience marked by memorable encounters with derelicts, lawyers, a taxi driver, a hooker, et al, and with cameo appearances by Henry Kissinger and the ghost of Marlene Dietrich.
This idiosyncratic biography of Rahel Levin Varnhagen, a 19th-century German-Jewish Berlin literary salon hostess may at first seem esoteric to the general reader. A prickly, contradictory character, Arendt’s portrayal of Rahel’s outsider status as a Jew in a largely hostile Christian society, her proto-feminist self-affirmation of her womanhood at a time when women were essentially groomed for marriage, and her paradoxical mix of intellectual self-assurance and crippling emotional insecurities make for a riveting read. You don’t have to be Jewish or a woman to appreciate the complexities of this prototypical Berliner.
Born in 1771 as the daughter of a Jewish merchant, Rahel Varnhagen would come to host one of the most prominent salons of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Hannah Arendt discovered her writings some time in the mid-1920s, and soon began to re-imagine Rachel's inner life and write her biography. Arendt draws a lively and complex portrait of a woman during the period of the Napoleonic wars and the early emancipation of the Jews, a figure who met and corresponded with some of the most celebrated authors, artists, and politicians of her time. She documents Rahel's attempts to…
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
I am a professor of visual studies from Canada who has always been interested in dream life—although I’ll admit, it took me a long time to treat this domain as a serious research topic (sometimes the somberness of the academy can impede more adventurous pursuits). I created the Museum of Dreams as a place to explore the social and political significance of these visions, which has led to amazing collaborations with institutions, communities, and individuals around the world. I hope this list has inspired you to attend more closely to your own dreams!
This book broke my heart—in the best possible way.
Imagine a biopic about Scheherazade, but in this version, it’s a coming-of-age story of a Palestinian American woman who grew up between Kuwait, Beirut, Abu Dhabi, Dallas, and Oklahoma City, and is now a 30-something poet living in Brooklyn.
And instead of compulsively telling stories to keep a murderous king enthralled, she compulsively tells stories to hold her marriage together while struggling with addiction and infertility. And her dreams are the backbone holding it all together.
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • AN NPR BOOK OF THE YEAR • ONE OF TIME'S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF THE YEAR • AN ELECTRIC LITERATURE BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR • The rich and deeply personal debut memoir by award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist Hala Alyan, whose experience of motherhood via surrogacy forces her to reckon with her own past, and the legacy of her family's exile and displacement, all in the name of a new future.
After a decade of yearning for parenthood, years marked by miscarriage after miscarriage, Hala Alyan makes the…
I am a professor of visual studies from Canada who has always been interested in dream life—although I’ll admit, it took me a long time to treat this domain as a serious research topic (sometimes the somberness of the academy can impede more adventurous pursuits). I created the Museum of Dreams as a place to explore the social and political significance of these visions, which has led to amazing collaborations with institutions, communities, and individuals around the world. I hope this list has inspired you to attend more closely to your own dreams!
I know what you’re thinking, “Freud, really?” Yes, really.
This is one of the origins of that wildly counterintuitive idea that the best way to enlarge the scope of your world is to pay attention to your dreams. But apart from specialized scholars and practicing clinicians, who can read all 700 pages of his giant tomb, The Interpretation of Dreams?
Even Freud realized he needed a shorter book for his ideas to reach the public. So, he produced this “brochure” (as he called it) aimed at a general audience. All of his big ideas are here—dream-work, day residues, the unconscious—but in a much more manageable size.
And reading it offers proof that psychoanalysis remains as vital today as it did when it was invented 125 years ago.
Among the first of Sigmund Freud's many contributions to psychology and psychoanalysis was The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, and considered his greatest work - even by Freud himself. Aware, however, that it was a long and difficult book, he resolved to compile a more concise and accessible version of his ideas on the interpretation of dreams. That shorter work is reprinted here. Since its publication, generations of readers and students have turned to this volume for an authoritative and coherent account of Freud's theory of dreams as distorted wish fulfillment.
After contrasting the scientific and popular views of…
Unlike most children of immigrants who were told nothing about the past, I grew up surrounded by family history—my grandfather’s village in Russia, my father’s memories of 1930s Europe, and my mother’s childhood on a migrant worker farm during the Great Depression. I realized that history isn’t just names and dates but a unique opportunity to study human behavior. I wrote Hammer of the Gods about the Thule Society because Thule was often mentioned in passing by historians of Nazi Germany, as if they were uncomfortable delving into an occult group recognized as influential on the Nazis. I decided I wanted to learn who they were and what they wanted.
There have been more recent accounts of Hitler’s retreat to the bunker in the last weeks of his life. But even if some new information has surfaced since Britain’s H.R. Trevor-Roper wrote his report, the vividness is hard to match. Trever-Roper recorded his thoughts on Hitler’s end before the rubble of war had been cleared away. It was almost on-the-scene reporting.
Late in 1945, Hugh Trevor-Roper was appointed by the British Intelligence to investigate the conflicting evidence surrounding Hitler's final days. The author, who had access to American counterintelligence files and to German prisoners, focuses on the last ten days of Hitler's life, April 20-29, 1945, in the underground bunker in Berlin.
Robert Gerwarth is a professor of modern history at University College. After completing his DPhil at Oxford, he has held visiting fellowships at Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the European University Institute in Florence. He is the author and editor of more than ten books on modern German history, most recently November 1918: The German Revolution.
If you only have time to read one book on the Nazi leadership, it should be this one. It is not the lightest of books (and it has two volumes), but it is well worth your time. Adolf Hitler was obviously central to the Nazi dictatorship and the number of books written about him reflects that. There are lots of biographies on Hitler – even a lot of good ones – but Ian Kershaw’s two-volume life of Hitler remains unsurpassed in my view. Kershaw skillfully combines his biography of the dictator with a wider social and political history of the Nazi dictatorship, so readers learn a great deal about both the man at the top of the regime and the ways in which the Third Reich functioned.
"The Hitler biography of the twenty-first century" (Richard J. Evans), Ian Kershaw's Hitler is a one-volume masterpiece that will become the standard work. From Hitler's origins as a failed artist in fin-de-siecle Vienna to the terrifying last days in his Berlin bunker, Kershaw's richly illustrated biography is a mesmerizing portrait of how Hitler attained, exercised, and retained power. Drawing on previously untapped sources, such as Goebbels's diaries, Kershaw addresses the crucial questions about the unique nature of Nazi radicalism, about the Holocaust, and about the poisoned European world that allowed Hitler to operate so effectively.
