Charlotte Beradt

Based on Wikipedia: Charlotte Beradt

In the early months of 1933, a friend told Charlotte Beradt about a strange dream he'd had. He was at work when Joseph Goebbels walked in. The friend found himself struggling to raise his arm in the Nazi salute—his body wouldn't cooperate, or perhaps his conscience wouldn't. It was the kind of dream that seems to mean something, and for Beradt, it sparked an obsession that would define her legacy.

She began collecting dreams.

Over the next six years, as Germany transformed into a totalitarian nightmare, Beradt secretly gathered approximately three hundred dreams from ordinary Germans—neighbors, acquaintances, strangers willing to share their nocturnal visions. What she discovered was that the regime had invaded the most private space imaginable: the sleeping mind.

A Life Shaped by Upheaval

Charlotte Beradt was born Charlotte Aron in 1901 (or possibly 1907—even her birth year carries uncertainty) to a Jewish family in Forst, a small town in southeastern Brandenburg near the Polish border. Her father Victor owned a factory across that border, and when Charlotte was five, the family relocated to Berlin, the city that would shape her intellectual and political awakening.

After finishing school in 1919, she took a position at S. Fischer Verlag, one of Germany's most prestigious publishing houses. There she worked closely with the poet Oskar Loerke and met Martin Beradt, a lawyer, judge, and writer who would eventually become her second husband. But that marriage lay years in the future. In 1924, she wed journalist Heinz Pol, a film critic for the Vossische Zeitung.

The marriage pulled her into radical politics. Together, Charlotte and Heinz joined the Communist Party of Germany, known by its German initials KPD, and the Spartacus League, a revolutionary socialist movement. It was through these circles that she met Heinrich Blücher, who would later marry the philosopher Hannah Arendt. Some accounts suggest Charlotte and Blücher may have been romantically involved—the émigré community was small, and connections tangled. She eventually left the Communist Party after the Moscow show trials of the mid-1930s revealed Stalin's brutality, but her leftist convictions never entirely faded.

Her early journalism appeared in an eclectic mix of publications: the Dresdner Nachrichten, the intellectual journal Weltbühne, the women's magazine Die Dame, and the tabloid Tempo. In 1928, she and Heinz translated Charlie Chaplin's European travelogue into German—a small footnote that speaks to her range of interests and her comfort moving between high culture and popular entertainment.

The Night the Stormtroopers Came

On the night of February 27, 1933, the Reichstag building burned. The fire, almost certainly set by the Nazis themselves though they blamed communist agitators, gave Hitler the pretext he needed to suspend civil liberties and begin mass arrests of political enemies.

The Sturmabteilung—the SA, Hitler's paramilitary "brownshirts"—broke into Charlotte and Heinz's apartment that night and seized it. Both were arrested. Charlotte managed to secure her own release and, within days, arranged for Heinz's freedom as well. But there was no going back to their former life.

Heinz fled to Prague. Charlotte, already separated from him since 1928 (they divorced officially in October 1933), moved in with Martin Beradt in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin. The October 1933 Editors' Law, one of many Nazi statutes designed to drive Jews from professional life, barred her from journalism. The career she'd built was now illegal.

But she didn't stop working entirely. Instead, she went underground, covertly printing and circulating KPD leaflets and literature. It was dangerous work, the kind that could result in imprisonment or worse. And it was during this period of clandestine activity that she began her most unusual project: collecting dreams.

Recording the Unconscious Under Dictatorship

What makes Beradt's collection remarkable is not just what the dreams contain, but how she gathered them. She couldn't simply take notes in plain language—if the Gestapo found her materials, they would constitute evidence of disloyalty to the regime. So she developed a code. Hitler became "Uncle Hans." An "arrest" became a case of the flu. She hid her notes inside the bindings of books, then mailed those books to friends abroad for safekeeping, including to Heinz Pol in Prague.

The dreams themselves reveal something profound about how totalitarianism works. In one famous example, the friend who sparked her project—identified only as "Mr. S."—dreamed of struggling to perform the Nazi salute. Other dreamers found their walls turning transparent, their private conversations becoming public. One man dreamed that he could only speak in approved slogans, his authentic voice literally erased. Another dreamed of being persecuted by his own furniture.

These weren't nightmares about concentration camps or violence—most were collected before the full horror of the Nazi regime had been revealed. They were dreams about conformity, surveillance, and the extinction of the private self. The regime had colonized the unconscious mind. People were policing themselves even in sleep.

Escape and Exile

Charlotte and Martin Beradt married in July 1938, as conditions for Jews in Germany grew increasingly dire. The following July, they fled to London, where they spent a year waiting for American visas. In August 1940, they crossed the Atlantic aboard the Cunard Line's Scythia, one of its last civilian voyages before the ship was converted to a troop carrier for the war in the Middle East.

New York offered safety but not comfort. The Beradts arrived with nothing, and Martin's worsening blindness meant Charlotte had to support them both. She became a hairdresser, working out of their West End Avenue apartment—an unlikely career for a former journalist and political activist, but one that sustained them.

The makeshift salon became something more: a gathering place for German exiles. Her clients included Bella Chagall, the writer and wife of the painter Marc Chagall, and the Austrian actress Elisabeth Bergner. One client, Gerda Meyerhoff, later remembered the experience fondly: "It was the most literary hair-dyeing experience I have ever experienced. The conversation was so interesting, it was such a literary environment with such clever women; the most incredible women were always coming and going."

There's something poignant about this image—a group of brilliant, displaced women finding community in the midst of mundane beauty work, speaking German in a Manhattan apartment while war raged across the ocean.

Return to Writing

The Beradts became American citizens in August 1946. Martin died three years later, in November 1949, and Charlotte gradually returned to the work she'd been forced to abandon. Her articles appeared in various German and German-language publications: the Deutsche Zeitung, Christ und Welt, the Frankfurter Rundschau, and Aufbau, a newspaper for German-Jewish refugees in New York. She wrote about seventy-five film and theater reviews for Aufbau and the Frankfurter Rundschau alone.

She also produced radio programs for WDR, the major public broadcaster in West Germany, including segments for its flagship daily show Kritisches Tagebuch (Critical Diary). Her subjects ranged widely, but she took particular interest in the American civil rights movement, producing stories on Adam Clayton Powell, the Harlem congressman; Marcus Garvey, the Black nationalist leader; and Father Divine, the charismatic preacher who led the International Peace Mission movement.

This focus on civil rights suggests something about Beradt's ongoing political commitments. Having witnessed one form of persecution up close, she was drawn to document resistance against another.

In 1969, she published a biography of Paul Levi, a social democratic and communist politician who had been a personal friend, along with a volume of his collected essays and speeches. Four years later, she produced a radio program about Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary socialist leader murdered in 1919, and edited a volume of Luxemburg's correspondence. These projects connected her later career to her radical youth—a closing of the circle.

The Arendt Connection

Charlotte Beradt's relationship with Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish philosopher who became one of the twentieth century's most influential political thinkers, deserves special attention. They met through Heinrich Blücher, Arendt's husband, after he and Hannah arrived in New York in May 1941. Blücher was Charlotte's old acquaintance from the Communist Party days—possibly more than an acquaintance.

The connection proved intellectually productive. Beradt translated four of Arendt's English-language lectures, delivered between 1953 and 1956, into German. These were published in 1957 under the title Fragwürdige Traditionsbestände im politischen Denken der Gegenwart—roughly, "Questionable Traditions in Contemporary Political Thought." She also translated an Arendt essay on the philosopher Karl Jaspers, and her German translation of Arendt's essay on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution appeared in 1958.

It's fitting that Beradt served as a bridge between Arendt's English and German voices. Both women were Jewish refugees from Hitler's Germany. Both had been involved with leftist politics in the Weimar Republic. Both were concerned with how totalitarianism deforms human life. Arendt explored these questions philosophically; Beradt gathered evidence from the unconscious minds of ordinary people.

The Third Reich of Dreams

Beradt's dream collection first reached a broader audience in 1943, when a selection appeared in an English-language article in Free World magazine. But the full book took decades to materialize.

In 1962, she met the journalist Roland Wiegenstein while visiting the writer Karl Otten in Locarno, Switzerland. Together they developed "Träume im Terror" (Dreams in Terror), a radio story about the dreams that aired on WDR in 1963. The broadcast caught the attention of Martin Gregor-Dellin, an editor at Nymphenburger Verlag, an independent publisher with a distinguished history—they had published the verdicts of the Nuremberg trials, the postwar newspaper Der Ruf, and the work of Klaus Mann, son of Thomas Mann.

The book, collecting only a fraction of the approximately three hundred dreams Beradt had gathered, appeared in German in 1966 as Das Dritte Reich des Traums (The Third Reich of Dreams). The title is a brilliant pun: "Reich" means both "realm" and "empire," so the title suggests both "the third realm of dreams"—dreams as a domain alongside waking life and politics—and "the dreams of the Third Reich."

The initial reception was brutal. Beradt later recalled that "the book received an enormous amount of criticism, did not sell at all, and was later offered on the clearance sale table." When an English translation appeared in 1968 from Quadrangle Books, it included an afterword by Bruno Bettelheim, the Holocaust survivor and psychoanalyst. Bettelheim's essay was less an endorsement than a complaint: Beradt, he argued, had captured only the "manifest content" of the dreams—what dreamers spontaneously remembered—without the deeper psychological analysis that would reveal their "latent" meanings. This amounted to "educated guesswork," in his view, insufficient for serious psychoanalytic interpretation.

Bettelheim's criticism missed the point. Beradt wasn't writing as a psychoanalyst seeking to interpret individual psyches. She was writing as a journalist and political witness, documenting how an entire society internalized authoritarianism. The manifest content was precisely what mattered: these were the images and narratives that ordinary Germans carried with them, the mental furniture of life under dictatorship.

Rediscovery and Legacy

The book's reputation slowly changed. The German historian Reinhart Koselleck contributed an essay to the second German edition in 1981, and his intellectual endorsement helped establish The Third Reich of Dreams as an important document. Historians, philosophers, and psychoanalysts began to recognize what Beradt had achieved: a unique archive of how totalitarian power infiltrates consciousness itself.

The book has since been translated into French, Croatian, Portuguese, Catalan, Spanish, and Italian. For years, the English-language edition remained out of print, the publication rights presumed lost. But in 2025, a new English translation by Damion Searls appeared from Princeton University Press, with a foreword by the Iraqi-American poet Dunya Mikhail. The republication was made possible partly through the work of filmmaker Amanda Rubin, who located the English-language rights while researching a documentary about Beradt's life.

The documentary, also titled The Third Reich of Dreams, remains in production. Rubin has received funding from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future, and the German Federal Ministry of Finance. In 2024, she was Filmmaker in Residence at the Jewish Film Institute, where she worked on the project.

Charlotte Beradt died in New York City in 1986, having outlived her second husband by nearly four decades. Her papers are held in the German Literature Archive in Marbach, one of the major repositories for German literary history.

Why Dreams Matter

What makes Beradt's work enduringly fascinating is its insight into the mechanics of unfreedom. Totalitarian regimes don't simply coerce behavior through external threats—they reshape interior life. Citizens begin to police their own thoughts, to feel guilty for private dissent, to experience conformity not as compulsion but as natural.

The dreams Beradt collected show this process in action. When a man dreams that his walls have become transparent, he's not responding to an actual surveillance technology—the Nazis had no such capability in the 1930s. He's revealing that he has internalized the possibility of surveillance, that he no longer feels private even in his own home. The regime has installed itself inside his head.

This insight resonates far beyond Nazi Germany. Anyone living under any form of authoritarian pressure—political, religious, corporate—might recognize the feeling. The awareness that someone might be watching, that certain thoughts are dangerous, that the safest course is self-censorship. Beradt's dreamers were ordinary people doing their best to survive, and their unconscious minds recorded the cost.

The book also raises profound questions about dreams themselves. Are they merely the brain's housekeeping, neurons firing randomly during sleep? Or do they contain meaning—not the hidden symbols that Freudian analysts sought, but something simpler: an honest record of what we fear, what we desire, what we can't quite acknowledge while awake?

Beradt didn't try to answer these questions definitively. She simply gathered evidence and let readers draw their own conclusions. In that sense, she remained a journalist to the end: documenting reality, even the strangest reality, with care and precision.

A Hairdresser's Salon on West End Avenue

Perhaps the most affecting image in Beradt's life isn't the dramatic one—the stormtroopers breaking into her apartment, the coded notes hidden in book bindings—but the quieter one: a group of exiled women in a Manhattan apartment, getting their hair done while talking about literature and politics, finding community in displacement.

Beradt had been a communist, a journalist, a political prisoner, a refugee, a translator for one of the century's great philosophers. And then she was a hairdresser. She did what was necessary to survive, and she made of that necessity something meaningful—a literary salon disguised as a beauty parlor.

There's a lesson there about resilience, about how people maintain their humanity under pressure. The dreams she collected told one story: the invasion of the mind by totalitarian power. Her life told another: the stubborn persistence of culture, connection, and care even in exile. Both stories matter. Both are part of what she left us.