In 1966, an obscure book was published in Germany: Das Dritte Reich des Traums. An English translation, The Third Reich of Dreams, was published two years later but it has since fallen out of print. The book was written by Charlotte Beradt, a Jewish journalist based in Berlin when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. That year she was banned from publishing her work and secretly began recording the dreams of her fellow citizens in the middle-class region of west Berlin where she lived. As fascism took hold of the German state, and as knowledge control and surveillance became the norm, Beradt recorded the effects on the population. By 1939, she had chronicled hundreds of dreams. To protect herself and her interviewees, Beradt hid her transcripts and disguised political figures in her notes (substituting Hitler, Göring and Goebbels with anecdotal characters in her own family). Just before the outbreak of World War II, she mailed her notes to New York, where she herself escaped as a refugee in 1939. Her apartment in the West Village would later become a gathering place for fellow German emigrants, including Hannah Arendt. In 1966, Beradt finally published the recorded dreams in Germany. 

In The Third Reich of Dreams, Beradt captures the deep paralysis that slowly grips society under fascism – documenting how the hegemony of knowledge and totalitarian rule, all in the name of unity and ‘making a country great again’, has a paralysing effect on citizens of all persuasions. She records the deep fears of herself and her fellow Germans in resisting the governmental control of knowledge and growing accepted political violence. The recorded dreams offer us a visceral warning of how fascism works to control a population through the hegemonic management of information and anticipation of how the public sphere should be governed. Joseph Goebbels was after all the Minister for ‘Public Enlightenment and Propaganda’.

In April 2025, Princeton University Press will release a new version of The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation. Beradt’s recording of the ‘nightmares of a nation’ is presciently relevant today, as the world faces a range of spiralling crises in which political leaders dictate the underpinning knowledges of governmental action – from the waging of political violence and war to the ongoing enabling of the worst excesses of capitalist production in the name of profit. Black is white, and white is black, if it said often enough. Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler created the communicative architecture to ensure this in the Third Reich. As early as 1927, Goebbels remarked how the “essential characteristic of propaganda is effectiveness”, it “does not need to be intellectual”, and must “express our worldview in a way that can be understood by the masses”. Hitler was even more clearcut in 1930, three years before he came to power: “Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious. The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly: it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over”. Nine years later, when Charlotte Beradt fled Germany, knowledge control and political paralysis had been firmly established. The devasting consequences for millions across Europe and the wider world was just over the horizon.

Today, political paralysis takes root in the face of impoverished political leadership across the globe. So many of my colleagues in university tell me they tend to avoid the news these days, and certainly in terms of trying to maintain a positive energy for all those you care for, I can understand the inclination to avoid the overwhelming negativity, profound anti-intellectualism and depressingly narrow populism. In all of this, however, lies the danger of paralysis: not calling out untruths and the denial of facts in the seemingly endless political self-aggrandising; not denouncing the worrying norm of unelected and unqualified political influencers; not exposing the ecologically irresponsible narratives of dominant economic policies; not refusing the disgraceful denigrations of any country insisting upon human rights principles on the global stage; not demanding the operation of International Humanitarian Law; not supporting the rejuvenation of effective global governance institutions for our precarious planet; and not standing up for perilous worlds beyond ourselves – worlds brimming with the lives of human beings with rights, cultures, histories, children and dreams just like us.

One of the great joys and privileges of my life is teaching, and eliciting in my students a concern for the world. It helps, in so many ways, in not feeling overwhelmed by paralysis. There are of course many other vital ways of striving to make a difference: from trade unionism and solidarity campaigns, to grassroots activism and community organizing; from local political involvement and leadership to offering productive expertise at every level of politics, policy making and citizenship assemblies. All of the above and more will be perennially needed for flourishing democracies everywhere.

And let us be under no illusions: standing up for democratic principles is increasingly under attack. When US Vice-President JD Vance recently met with Germany’s far-right leader, Alice Weidel, he simultaneously eschewed a meeting with the democratically elected German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz. Both alarming and revealing, it happened in the kind of communicative bluster that Goebbels advocated in the same country in the middle of the last century. Vance’s subsequent lecturing of Europe on its project to “destroy democracy” echoed the textbook operation of fascist knowledge. As Zoe Williams put it in The Guardian: “he’s describing black as white, openly turning observable reality on its head”, and this creates a paralysis that “gets into everything”: you “can’t respond to the news, you can’t look at the news, but you know it’s still there”.

In thinking about paralysis, James Joyce’s Ulysses comes to mind and his brilliant capturing of modernity’s tendency to forget history’s most important lessons. History, he wrote, is “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”. In the century since its publication, humankind has continued its propensity to forget history, and the paralysis that Joyce felt has not diminished. More than ever, we need to remember its dangers.

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