He was wrong.  

In Nazi Germany, sleep was a poor protection from the horrors of the external world, as Charlotte Beradt, a Berlin journalist, found out. Beradt, a Jew and a Communist—and thus an ultimate outsider in Hitler’s state—began having unsettling dreams shortly after the Nazi takeover of the government in 1933, dreams of being “chased, tortured, shot at, [and] scalped,” from which she awakened drenched in sweat. Wondering if others might be having similar experiences, she began collecting dream reports from neighbors, friends, and acquaintances, aided in some cases by a friendly physician who would ask his patients about their dreams in the context of their office visits. She recorded them in her notebook or on scraps of paper, often in coded language so they would be unrecognizable to prying eyes, especially of the police. This project engaged her from 1933 until she left Germany in 1939, ultimately winding up in New York City and settling among a community of German expatriates and refugees, including Hannah Arendt. She originally published her dream reports in 1966; this new English translation by Damion Searls appeared in 2025. 

The book is divided into eleven chapters, each reporting several dreams that are linked by a common thread. Patterns emerge and are echoed: initially, the loss of privacy and the intrusion of state policies into everyday life. There are dreams in which the dreamer is under surveillance or feel they must conform to state policies; Goebbels and Hitler appear in several of these, or exist in the background. There are Kafkaesque nightmares where household items like stoves and pillows become monitors of activity or nagging and accusatory voices (Beradt refers to the “Orwellian” sense of being watched, noting that the dream content prefigures Orwell’s 1984 by many years).  

Interestingly, after 1935 (and the passage of the notorious Nuremberg Race Laws) dreams show up in the text characterized by a preoccupation with the wish for the ideal Aryan body type (blonde, blue-eyed, tall), or, more commonly, the preoccupation with the dreamer’s falling short of this ideal and being singled out for it. Non-Jewish Germans have dreams in which their noses are too prominent and “the authorities” accuse them, directly or indirectly, of having Jewish ancestry. And in her final chapter, “Jewish Dreamers, or, ‘I’ll Make Way for the Trash, if Needed,’ ” Beradt catalogues the dreams of Jewish Germans, dreams of exile, loss, hounding and pursuit, and self-abnegation. 

The book is a relatively brief (122 pages) compendium of nightmares, some of which have the feel of surrealistic short film clips, which catalogues the increasing encroachment of a totalitarian state on the lives—and into the unconscious worlds—of its subjects. The author’s analyses of dreams bespeak her familiarity with dreamwork concepts (she is referred to in several biographical sketches—not part of the book—as a “member of the Berlin psychoanalytic community,” although she was not a trained psychoanalyst), and many of her interpretations are sophisticated and suggest significant familiarity with Freudian concepts.  

It is worth noting that Beradt has probably surveyed a skewed population; her subjects are mostly people she knows, or referred by people she knows and presumably trusts, and there is a selection bias, in that she has probably not approached, say, Nazi Party members or sympathizers for their dreams. A large number of the dreams seem to date from the early years of the Third Reich, 1933-1935/6; it is possible that in the later years it was just too terrifying to talk about one’s nighttime visions…or that the dreamers had started to leave the country. 

The Third Reich of Dreams makes absorbing and chilling reading. It is fascinating to see how dreams, the realm of the personal unconscious, become infiltrated by and reflective of societal change in real time. Sometimes “the royal road to the unconscious” leads straight to the dreamer’s front door.  

The Third Reich of Dreams  
by Charlotte Beradt, translated by Damion Searls 
c. 1966, 2025 
Princeton University Press 
122 pp. 

Web photo by Ed Wingate 

What makes The Magician so unique as a novel is its depiction of writing as an all-encompassing creative activity that consumes the author’s full psychic energy and that emerges out of his personal struggles as an individual. It would be impossible to affix The Magician to the back cover of all editions of Buddenbrooks or The Magic Mountain. Tóibín offers more than a page of scholarly references to help a reader gain background knowledge about Mann, his life, and the times. But if you are interested in what it might have been like for Thomas Mann to compose these monumental works, Tóibín’s book might offer the best entry point into Mann’s artistic mind and his creative persona.  

The novel covers the full panorama of Mann’s life, from his somewhat pampered childhood in Lübeck, Germany, to his final years spent in the German expatriate community of Los Angeles. The writer’s camera is laser focused on ground level details and refuses to zoom out to the big picture and lose its granular tone. The texture of the bourgeois lifestyle of the Mann family is captured in all its minutia including rowdy family meals, community engagements, and professional insults. One can almost feel the temperature rise and the climate change as Mann and his family move from Munich to Princeton and finally to Pacific Palisades. Mann exerted very tight control over his daily routine and one senses his absence on the page as he withdraws to his private study every morning after breakfast to write without any interruptions. We are excluded from this sanctuary just like his wife and children as they waited for him to emerge after lunch for his afternoon walk and some playtime with them.

Mann was more than a prominent novelist. He was a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, globally recognized and one of the most famous personalities of his time. He hobnobbed with dignitaries and the leading figures of the pre-World War II era, including Einstein and FDR. They parade across the pages of the novel with all their foibles and idiosyncrasies. Tóibín details Mann’s tempestuous relationship with Agnes Meyer, a leading figure in high society along the New York-Washington DC corridor. I had to look her up to learn that she was a well-known journalist and civil right activist and Katherine Graham’s mother to appreciate her impact on the world during the 1930s and 40s. 

The most striking feature of the book is the intimate recounting of Mann’s tortured struggles with his sexual orientation, which infiltrated his fiction from the very beginning of his career. He never denied his homoerotic longings and Tóibín delicately describes the many occasions during his long life when Mann was overwhelmed with desire for a particular man and his secretive attempts to act on his cravings. But he was a man of his era and was forced to submerge his identity as a gay man most of the time. The emotional cost of a life lived closeted on the one hand, and as the married father of six children on the other, is readily apparent. Reading The Magician motivated me to reread Death in Venice and made me realize the courage it must have taken for Mann to portray Aschenbach’s tragic story in such complex but precise prose, to reify his own emotional turmoil without sanctimony or defensiveness. Tóibín’s prose is the ideal conduit to channel the roiling interface between the Mann of the larger world and the inner literary mind of a flesh and bones historical human being. 

The Magician is an engrossing reading experience that also has special salience for followers of the MedHum website, which explores the role of the individual in a changing society. A key element that drives the narrative forward is Mann’s engagement with the political developments in Germany over the long period spanning from the lead-in to World War I, to the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914 and again in September 1939 and the devastating war years, and ending with the rebuilding of his native country. At the start, Mann saw himself as heir to a tradition of German intellectual excellence and nobility. He took great pride in his country and patriotically defended the decision to go to war against France, Britain, and Russia in August 1914. However, he recognized the dangers posed by the Nazi seizure of power and openly decried the degradation of public life. Mann felt the Nazi destruction of the German cultural heritage as a personal betrayal. Mann recognized early on the brutality of the antisemitic legislation and the attacks on his Jewish colleagues. He was forced to weigh loyalty to country against the defense of universal humanistic principles and he struggled to find a path forward between these competing ideals.  

As Hitler rose to power, were Mann’s instincts right that this would bring calamity to Germany, or should he have had trust in his fellow citizens that things would right themselves? How much could Mann rely on his interpretation of unfolding political events and his prediction of what the future would look like? Once the Nazis consolidated their dictatorial control of the Reich and set out on a course for total war and extermination of the Jews, should Mann have been a strident and outspoken opponent of the regime or should he have worked more discreetly behind the scenes? Should he have remained in Germany and risked his own life and the safety of his family, especially his wife’s Jewish relatives, or sought refuge in America, where he could serve as a champion of cultural enlightenment and world peace? How does one weigh the facts and decide on an effective course of moral action? How does one choose among imperfect options? 

Like all of us, Mann was forced to anticipate events and make painful decisions—decisions that would play out over time and have consequences for others– in real time and with only partial or inaccurate data. Much like the case with physicians and other health care professionals, most of these decisions will work out well, some will be imperfect, and a few will even be wrong. Tóibín’s novel, history as fiction, vividly illustrates the human predicament of living while moving forward with uncertainty and anxiety because full clarity only comes in retrospect — something that doctors understand because they experience it nearly every day in encounters with their patients.  

The Magician – Reading by Colm Tóibín & Conversation with Friedhelm Marx at the Thomas Mann House 

The Magician: A Novel 
Colm Tóibín 
New York: Scribner, 2021, 512 pages  

Photo of Thomas Mann generated from Wikicommon Photos