I wasn’t familiar with The Third Reich of Dreams until it appeared on my Goodreads feed, but the moment I saw it, I made it a priority. It sits exactly at the intersection of two areas I’m deeply interested in: the Holocaust and psychology, especially dreams and Jungian thought.
A few months before October 7th, I had a dream that condensed the entire war into one horrific, overwhelming image. I woke up with a very clear feeling that the dream wasn’t about me personally, but about something collective, a shared unconscious current. In the months that followed, I encountered more and more people who reported eerily similar dreams before the war. Naturally, this book immediately intrigued me.
The dreams Beradt collected are chilling. They offer a truly fascinating glimpse into the psychic atmosphere of the 1930s, with recurring motifs such as expressionless faces, silent or emotionless phone calls from authorities, and even everyday household objects that speak or report on the dreamer. The surreal, cinematic quality of these dreams is striking, this material could easily (and should) be adapted into a film, with each dream forming a distinct scene. Very kafkaesque, at that.
In the foreword, Beradt suggests that these dreams should be taken literally rather than symbolically, since they are already “processed” by reality itself, direct psychic responses to political pressure. I strongly disagree. Her general approach to dreams and their interpretation feels quite shallow. While her political reading is often sharp and intellectually engaging, it comes at the expense of deeper psychological meaning.
What surprised me most is the complete absence of Carl Jung. Given the subject matter, collective fear, shared imagery, symbolic invasion of the psyche, his concept of the collective unconscious feels almost unavoidable, not to mention the archetypes that worked their forces in those years. Jung himself recorded large, symbolic dreams before both World Wars. Even Sigmund Freud is absent. Whether this omission was political, intentional, or circumstantial, it is striking. Jung’s ideas hover over this book like a silent presence, even if Beradt does not acknowledge them.
Beradt was not a psychologist, and she does not claim to be one. Still, I couldn’t help feeling that many dream symbols were misinterpreted or underinterpreted. Her readings are interesting on an intellectual and historical level, but a deeper psychological analysis would have greatly enriched the material. She reportedly collected around 300 dreams, only a fraction of which appear in the book, and I suspect some of the most revealing material may have been left out. Also, if there was any school she was at, it was Hanna Arendt.
Despite these reservations, the book remains powerful and unsettling. It documents something that is rarely preserved: the inner life of a society before catastrophe fully unfolds. Truely fascinating.
I only wish there were more books devoted to this specific subject.