Hilter and Dreams

In the 1930′s psychoanalyst Charlotte Beradt recorded and collected people’s dreams during Hitler’s rise to power: The Third Reich of Dreams. The material had to be smuggled out of Germany in code. In his essay at the conclusion of the volume, published in 1966, Bruno Bettelheim remarked that it was a shocking experience reading this book of dreams and seeing how effectively the Nazis murdered sleep, forcing its enemies to dream dreams that showed that resistance was impossible and that safety lay only in compliance. (Source)



This is one of the dreams. (It’s lengthy, but one gets the idea pretty quickly about how closely dreams can echo the dynamics of the culture and time.):


The author of the dream was told by the Nazi authorities to report to the Berlin Railway Station on a Sunday morning to collect money for the Party. Before leaving he said to himself, “What the heck, I won’t be bothered.” So he brought along a pillow and blanket – no collection box – and took it easy.


After about an hour Hitler appeared, wearing high patent-leather boots, dressed as a comical cross between a circus clown and a lion tamer. The dreamer watched Hitler use exaggerated, artificial gestures to win the hearts of schoolchildren. Then he adopted a stern attitude as he lectured a group of older boys and girls. At last he turned to impress a group of old maids by acting coquettish. Suddenly the dreamer began to feel uncomfortable under his blanket. He grew afraid that Hitler would notice that he had no collection box – he might be recognized as one of “the group of those who pretend to sleep.” If caught, he imagined confronting Hitler and telling him that he doesn’t approve of concentration camps.


Hitler continued his appearances around the station with different groups of people, and the dreamer was amazed to see that no one seemed to be afraid of him. He noticed that someone even kept a cigarette in his mouth while talking with him, and many more were smiling! After completing his stint at the station, he picked up his pillow and blanket and went down the main stairway in the station. Then the dreamer saw Hitler standing at the top of the stairs, concluding his appearance with a song from the imaginary opera, Magica, making extremely theatrical gestures, which had the crowd mesmerized. Everybody applauded. He bowed and then went tearing down the stairs, looking foolish in his purple trousers and holding his trainer’s whip. Hitler passed by with no bodyguards and stood in line at the cloakroom like everyone else, waiting patiently to get his coat. At this point the dreamer thought, “Maybe he’s not so bad after all. Maybe I needn’t take the trouble to oppose him.” All at once he realized that instead of a pillow and blanket, he was carrying a collection box.


This is a comment on the dream and the book:


This dreamer sees Hitler as a manipulator par excellence – an animal trainer – and yet the big act that Hitler puts on works in the end: the dreamer begins to feel that things are not half bad and maybe he doesn’t have to worry about Hitler after all. Winston Smith, sipping his Victory Gin with tears of gratitude in his eyes, reached a similar conclusion about Big Brother, although he got there by a different route. The average person struggling with their conscience in the face of dehumanizing conditions, is, like Orwell’s hero, “a hero who is basically neither good nor bad, up against the effects of a political system which in the end leaves open but one direction in which he can move – the one toward the movement.” Individuals are embedded in a repressive psycho-political system, unable to act independently or resist the forces that are propelling the motion of society in the direction of Nazi domination.


The Third Reich of Dreams is a book that tells a compelling and revealing story about the hidden side of WWII. It portrays how the German subconscious mind was invaded by totalitarian fear as the Nazi’s plans reached fever pitch during the 1930′s. The grooming of Hitler and his evil cadre, the rise to power of the Nazi State, and the mobilization of the country for Total War, were all carried out with cold-blooded determination and ruthless precision by human beings whose very souls had been violated and whose minds were controlled.


Beradt collected hundreds of dreams during 1933 through 1939, referring to them as “diaries of the night,” providing a view into the inner world of fear and confusion people were feeling as their personal integrity disintegrated and their lives fell apart. The dreams she selected for the book are drawn from the lives of ordinary people who found themselves confronting the mental terror of The Third Reich during the early years of the Nazi regime. These dreams show that this was a war on the human spirit. It was secretly about capturing inner ground and blowing apart the national psyche, destroying all the ground gained over centuries of psycho-spiritual development, doing away with a whole generation of artists, writers, and scientists, and burying the work of these creative people underneath the rubble and ruin of Total War.
(Source)