The Third Reich of Dreams

In 1933, the Berlin journalist and writer Charlotte Beradt began collecting dreams: dreams that were dreamed under the Nazi reign of terror until 1939. Fifty such “dreams dictated by the dictatorship” appeared in a book in 1962 that seems more relevant today than ever. The volume brings together dream notes from Beradt's personal environment, which seem like literary seismographs of the establishment of a dictatorship; notes which tell of people “as they become cogs in a totalitarian mechanism” and which seem to anticipate the crimes that were to follow.

The great actor Karl Markovics reads from Beradt's book at HERBSTGOLD. These literary testimonies are juxtaposed with works by composers such as Paul Hindemith, Igor Stravinski and Stefan Wolpe: musical masterpieces that were banned as “degenerate” during the Third Rech in order to “protect” the population from the influence of Judaism, communism and modernity.