The Third Reich of Dreams

In 1933, the Berlin journalist and writer Charlotte Beradt began collecting dreams: Dreams that were dreamt until 1939 under the reign of terror of National Socialism. Fifty such ‘dreams dictated by the dictatorship’ were published in 1962 in a book that seems more relevant than ever today. The volume brings together dream notations from Beradt's personal environment that seem like literary seismographs of the establishment of a dictatorship; they tell of people ‘during their involvement as cogs in the total mechanism’ and seem to anticipate the crimes that were to follow.

The great actor Karl Markovics will read from Beradt's book at HERBSTGOLD. These literary testimonies will be juxtaposed with works by composers such as Paul Hindemith, Igor Stravinsky and Stefan Wolpe: musical masterpieces that were banned as ‘degenerate’ during the Third Reich in order to ‘protect’ the population from the influence of Judaism, communism and modernism.