Dreaming the Third Reich

The story of Charlotte Beradt's extraordinary and subversive dream project with a gripping struggle of ideas - between external and internal freedom, between the control of public and private space and the nightmare when the two are no longer quite distinguishable.

'I awoke bathed in perspiration; my teeth clenched. Once again, as on countless previous nights, I had been hunted from pillar to post in a dream - shot at, tortured, scalped. But on this night the thought occurred to me that I might not be the only one among thousands upon thousands to be condemned to such dreams by the dictatorship...'

This programme takes as its starting point the dream notebooks of Charlotte Beradt, a journalist, banned twice over by the Nazis for being both Jewish and Communist. She risked her life to document her German compatriots' nocturnal experiences even as their waking freedoms were being eroded. It's been said the difference between an authoritarian and a totalitarian state is that the former is happy to control your actions and your speech - whereas the latter aspires also to control your thoughts, your inner life. As the political philosopher Hannah Arendt put it, a regime becomes 'truly total… the moment it closes the iron vice of terror on its subjects' private social lives'.

Charlotte's collation of the dream data reads almost like a thriller, secretly meeting with Jewish and non-Jewish Berliners to record their intimate diaries-of-the-night. She took precautions to prevent the disclosure of her project, smuggling her notes in letters to friends, hiding them inside book bindings in her apartment. As a journalist living in Berlin she was already known to the regime. She was several times imprisoned and let go, arrested and reported on.

The dreams recorded from 1933 by Charlotte illuminate the shocked and conflicted unconscious of ordinary Berliners under the rise of fascism. The Nazis would develop their own antagonistic relationship with the new 'Jewish' science of psychoanalysis and dream interpretation - antisemitic of course, but also a danger to the psyche and therefore the body politic. Freud's work was banned, psychoanalysis demonised. But for Charlotte Beradt these dreams were not about the individual dreamers. They were a way of reading extreme political pressure - how recurrent images and themes (surveillance, co-option, freedom of thought) were shared across the dreams of a whole population, woven into a collective nightmare.

Hearing from Charlotte Beradt's friends, historians, political thinkers and psychoanalysts, this feature tells the story of the Nazis' early, internal domination of the German people - the regime's psychologically invasive power as illustrated in the records of Berliners' unconscious dreaming lives, becoming almost a shared political unconscious.

Contributors include Charlotte's friend and psychiatry professor Regina Casper, psychoanalyst and historian Daniel Pick, essayist Christy Wampole, Roger Berkowitz, founder of the Hannah Arendt Centre for Politics and Humanities in New York, psychoanalyst and writer Josh Cohen, filmmaker Amanda Rubin who republished Charlotte Beradt's 'The Third Reich of Dreams' in English and Lisa Appignanesi, who has written on women, memoir and the history of psychoanalysis.

Charlotte Beradt read by Sam Spiro, with dreamers Jane D'Albiac, Nick Poyntz and Susie Phillips

Producers: Simon Hollis and Amanda Rubin

A Brook Lapping production for BBC Radio 4