35th Annual Mortenson Distinguished Lecture

Abstract: Berlin, 1933. Shortly after Hitler is elected Chancellor, Journalist Charlotte Beradt (1906-1968) begins to experience vivid, disturbing nightmares. Realising she’s not alone, she embarks on a quiet mission to record the dream life of her Jewish and non-Jewish friends, colleagues, and neighbours 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.

Amanda Rubin, documentary filmmaker and journalist, has brought this 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”.

Against the pre-war European backdrop of book-burnings and book-bannings by university students, Beradt’s dangerous mission of compiling dreams soon evolves into a methodical, six-year project to collect ‘evidence’, bearing witness to the tormented reality of an authoritarian regime. In dreams as well as in life, walls “dissolve,” suspicion becomes “universal fact,” loudspeakers blare commands into bedrooms, and thought-detecting machines patrol public spaces—more than a decade before Orwell imagined such horrors in his dystopian novel, 1984.

Writing in code and hiding the notes in the bindings of books in her library, Beradt sends these secret ‘diaries of the night’ in innocuous-seeming letters, to friends abroad for safe-keeping. It was not until the 1960s, while an emigree in New York, that Beradt, a close friend of Philosopher Hannah Arendt, revisited the dream diaries and published The Third Reich of Dreams. Beradt explores common symbols, themes, and even warnings that had appeared in this unique archive of inner life under tyranny. Out of print for over 40 years, it was whilst researching a documentary that Filmmaker Amanda Rubin discovered and acquired the ‘lost’ English language rights.

As our own era confronts rising authoritarianism and deepening polarisation, dreams illuminate the subtle psychological mechanisms of control to reveal how propaganda distorts reality, how we unconsciously conform, and what happens when the distinctions between fact and fiction begin to dissolve.

Bio: A documentary filmmaker, journalist and independent scholar, Amanda Rubin works at the intersection of cultural history, music, the arts, and science. Her works have been featured on BBC, Channel 4, The History Channel, and Discovery+, among other notable channels. Her relevant recent work includes 21st Century Mythologies (BBC) which unpacks the 1957 book Mythologies, by French philosopher Roland Barthes, laying bare the mythmaking at the heart of consumer culture. It was while researching a film about journalist Charlotte Beradt and her unique dream anthology The Third Reich of Dreams that Amanda discovered the lost English language rights to the book. She was the force behind its republication in English in April 2025 with Princeton University Press to excellent reviews. She is currently also making a radio documentary for BBC Radio 4 about the dream collection and the role of psychotherapy under the Nazis. She lives and works in London. 

Questions? Contact the Mortenson Center for International Library Programs