Book Description

"In Germany there are no private matter any more. If your sleep, that's your private matter, but the moment you wake up and come into contact with another person, you must remember that you are a soldier of Adolf Hitler..."—Robert Ley, Organization Leader of the Nazi Party, Munich, 1938. But how "private" was sleep in the Third Reich? In this extraordinary book, the dreams of those who lived under the Nazis become documentary evidence of the range of terror envisioned by Kafka or Orwell. From 1933 to 1939, as a journalist in Germany, Mrs. Beradt recorded the dreams of hundreds of Germans; in this book she presents those of political content. With her perceptive interpretations, the dreams show the remarkable degree of control possible in a totalitarian state—how even the supposedly safe confines of the individual's sleeping life can be invaded by and turned to the purpose of the regime. These dreams are appalling, almost excruciating in the intensity of their despair and frustration. Together they illuminate one of the twentieth century's most bitter and overwhelming problems: how did a whole nation subject itself to totalitarianism and acquiesce in murder? IN this sense, the message of the book is profoundly political: how the citizenry cannot escape a totalitarian government; how the individual unknowingly adjusts to it; and how terror can make an accomplice of anyone, even the innocent. Bruno Bettleheim, in his concluding essay, explores the meaning of the book and calls it "a shocking experience...To understand ourselves, and the possibility of Nazi terror, we must study the dreams it evoked so that we shall truly know 'the stuff we are made on.'"-Publisher.