Night Falls Fast
I read "The Third Reich of Dreams," which is about literal dreams under literal Hitler
Creatures, when a friend saw that I was reading a book called The Third Reich of Dreams, she was all, “Dreams, like aspirations?” But no, this is the other kind, the thing where you close your eyes and you’re a pear or, let’s say, a stateless pear.
This is a slender book, published in the 1960s, but mostly drafted in the 1930s by a journalist who fled the Third Reich in 1939. She collected, via various semi-surreptitious means, the real nighttime dreams of housemaids and shoemakers, lawyers and eye doctors. She notes one big lacuna in her research—there are no dreams from committed Nazis. Those weren’t people she had access to. And I would read that book too, but this one is extraordinary in part because it focuses solely on people who thought of themselves as, at least to some degree, opposed to what was going on. And yet it was going on inside of them too.
There’s some introductory material, from both author Charlotte Beradt and the foreword by Dunya Mikhail, that’s a bit wheel-spinning. These dreams are parables, these dreams are paradoxes, these dreams are poetry. Fine! Good! Make with the dreams already!! And then Beradt does.
A math teacher dreams:
It was forbidden under penalty of death to write down anything to do with math. I took refuge in a bar (never in my life have I been to such a place). Drunks were swaying on their feet, the barmaids were half-naked, the band was cacophonous and deafening. I took an extremely thin sheet of paper out of my bag and wrote down a couple of equations in invisible ink, deathly afraid.
They dream of new departments—the Training Bureau for the Installation of Eavesdropping Devices in Walls—and new regulations—Regulation Prohibiting Bourgeois Backsliding Among Municipal Employees—and new propaganda campaigns against new enemies. They dream that they are denounced by their furniture, or by their knickknacks: “mirror, desk, desk clock, Easter egg.”
I was telling a forbidden joke, but I was telling it wrong on purpose, so it made no sense.
You know that poster with the putti from the Sistine Chapel? The ones who look weirdly bored? One girl, who had that poster over her bed, dreamed
that I woke up in the middle of the night and saw that the two angels hung above my bed were no longer looking up—they were looking down, keeping a sharp eye on me. I was so scared that I crawled under my bed.
Five themes stood out to me:
Complicity. This is a theme Beradt discusses in depth. Again and again, the dreams depict a process of acquiescence. A coming to belong in the Reich. An inability to resist. A seduction.
High culture. This is one of the things intellectuals always gnaw on when they’re talking about Nazi Germany—how did the lovers of Heine and Holderlin become the followers of Hitler? what does it mean that you can listen to Mozart after your hard day’s work at Bergen-Belsen?—and it’s fascinating to see how deeply German high culture permeated people’s dreams. In their dreams the opera house becomes the site of surveillance, degradation, and propaganda; lines from Heine and Goethe, and images from the German heroic narratives, become distorted or repurposed to depict a political abyss.
Prescience. Or maybe that’s the wrong way around. People dreamed things that later happened. They dreamed, in surreal detail, the later laws. Maybe their dreams allowed them to see things they were unwilling to acknowledge in the day (“the gift of fear” type of thing). Maybe there’s an abusive absurdity in dictatorships—it makes people feel more helpless if the rules themselves feel surreal, nightmarish. (One Jewish lawyer dreamed that he went to the Justice Minister and said, “I am filing a complaint that the ground is being pulled out from under me.”)
Resistance. People who were taking actual actions against the regime had dreams that were violent and fraught, but also exhilarating. They were able to resist, even in their dreams, whereas for the others, the bystanders (an unfair term but you know what I’m saying), dreams depicted their feelings of helplessness so vividly that the dreams themselves became Hitler’s agents.
Havenlessness. The final chapter is about the dreams of Jewish and “mixed-race” Germans. Some of them have dreams of complicity and shame, too. The lawyer who complained to the Justice Minister ended that dream in abjection. But the predominant theme is of fleeing and discovering that the Reich follows them wherever they go. And intertwined with this theme is the theme of recognition. You think you’ve found a haven, and then the mask comes off, and you say, like one dreamer,
I’d hoped I would recognize your kind right away the next time you came. I guess it’s my fault I didn’t.
On June 23, Bishop Alberto Rojas of the Diocese of San Bernardino, California, issued a letter responding to recent reports of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents entering Catholic churches.
“The fear is not limited to those who are undocumented. The fear extends to those with some sort of document who also fear that their document could be revoked.”
“The fear is wide, the fear runs deep, and this impacts their day-to-day behavior including the practice of the faith. We are seeing many parishes report a significant downturn in Mass attendance on Sunday,” [Father] Sandoval continued.
Via BDM, this quote from Joanna Russ’s “On the Fascination of Horror Stories, Including Lovecraft’s”:
Horror fiction is a fiction of extreme states (Adrienne Rich uses the phrase “poetry of extreme states” to describe some of Emily Dickinson’s work) and the message is (as Rich notes): Someone has been here before. You’re not alone. That is a comforting and important message to receive in a culture that is bent on denying the destructive, the irrevocable, the terrifying, and the demonic.…
sort of relevant: my America essay on horror and beauty
And this essay goes to some deep, searching, and moving places you would not expect from the author name “Transtrender” and the title “Why Are Nonbinary People Like That?” Give it a look if it intrigues you, and be sure to read to the very end, as the last two paragraphs pull back the beaded curtain barring the entrance to the essay’s heart.
That Goya painting, “The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters,” via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.