Amanda Rubin, documentary filmmaker and journalist, has brought The Third Reich of Dreams, a long-overlooked classic back to print in a newly-translated English edition (Princeton Press, 2025). Her Mortenson Distinguished Lecture will share Beradt’s incredible untold story and legacy of courage as a woman, journalist, and refugee. The lecture will focus on the power of the irrepressible imagination and the potent symbolism of books, writing and archiving as “witnesses to history”.
Book Description:
Set in Berlin, 1933. shortly after Hitler is elected Chancellor, Journalist Charlotte Beradt (1906-1968) begins to experience vivid, disturbing nightmares. Realizing she’s not alone, she embarks on a quiet mission to record the dream life of her Jewish and non-Jewish friends, colleagues, and neighbors in Berlin. She compiles an extraordinary document of the slow colonization of the unconscious as the Third Reich’s persecutions and propaganda seep into the last refuge of the private self. The resulting book: The Third Reich of Dreams