BERLIN, 1933. Shortly after Hitler seizes power, Jewish journalist Charlotte Beradt begins to experience vivid and disturbing nightmares. Realising she’s not alone, she embarks on a clandestine mission to record the dream life of her friends, colleagues, and neighbours—compiling an extraordinary document of how totalitarianism seeps into the unconscious mind of a nation.
Told through expressionistic animation, rare archival footage and verbatim testimony (including Charlotte’s diaries, letters and published works), THE THIRD REICH OF DREAMS plunges us into the surreal, shifting world of dreams under Nazi rule— where limbs freeze in involuntary salutes, walls vanish by decree, and nightmares pit survival against betrayal. With Germany descending deeper into fascism and Europe’s borders tightening, Charlotte races against time to encode and smuggle her secret archive out of the country—and attempts her own escape. What begins as an act of witnessing transforms into a profound form of resistance, one that contains not only a lesson but a warning.
The film is in late-development, supported with grants from The Claims Conference, Jewish Story Partners and a recent Film Residency at the Jewish Film Institute, San Francisco.
Out of print in English for over forty years, THE THIRD REICH OF DREAMS was republished in April 2025 by Princeton University Press, the ‘lost’ rights discovered whilst I was researching the film project.
Book Reviews:
“This is the kind of book that haunts your dreams. Essential reading for anyone who has known what it is like to live within a totalitarian state—or is worried they’re about to find out.” —ZADIE SMITH, The New York Review of Books
“Extraordinary. . . at once a nocturnal oral history, a collection of parables worthy of Kafka and a revelatory account of despotism internalized. . . .The least we can do is read this singular document with our eyes wide open.” — Wall Street Journal
“A strange, enthralling book. . . . The Third Reich of Dreams is a collective diary, a witness account hauled out of a nation’s shadows and into forensic light.” — New Yorker
“At once terrifying and illuminating, Beradt’s riveting dream book takes us deep into the psychological subject under Nazism. Its republication could not be timelier. The Kafkaesque landscape that emergesis all the more frightening because it is so close not only to the ordinary experience of Nazi times but also perhaps increasingly our own.” —Lisa Appignanesi
“An eerie reminder of totalitarianism’s torments, at a time when the world seems to be drifting once again towards darkness.” — Weekend Telegraph
“There is nothing like it in Holocaust literature.”
— Reinhart Kosseleck