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Jewish Women’s Voices Seminar: 'The Third Reich of Dreams': Amanda Rubin-Lewis and Devorah Baum in Conversation
Date: 25/11/2025
Time: 14:00 to 15:30
Location: The Buttery, Wolfson College and Online via Zoom
In this seminar, Amanda Rubin-Lewis and Devorah Baum discuss The Third Reich of Dreams, Charlotte Beradt’s recently republished archive of the dreams of Jewish and non-Jewish Berliners living under the Nazi regime.
Out of print in English for over forty years, this remarkable dream archive, which Charlotte risked her life to protect, stands as both testimony and warning—a unique seismograph of history, registering the tremors of totalitarianism through the minds of those who endured it.
“ … an eerie reminder of totalitarianism’s torments, at a time when the world seems to be drifting once again towards darkness”
—Weekend Telegraph
Like the dreams she preserved, Charlotte’s story raises questions that echo today:
Did ordinary Germans realise they were living through a historical nightmare?
Would we recognise the same signs if we were living through them ourselves?
As our own era confronts rising authoritarianism and deepening polarisation, these dreams illuminate the subtle psychological mechanisms of control—how propaganda distorts reality, how we unconsciously conform, and what happens when the distinction between fact and fiction begins to dissolv
About The Third Reich of Dreams:
“… 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, New York Review of Books
Soon after Hitler seized power in January 1933, Berlin-based journalist Charlotte Beradt began having disturbing dreams. Night after night, she finds herself hunted through snow-covered fields, stormtroopers at her heels. Shaken by these nightmares and banned as a Jew from working, she began secretly collecting dreams from her friends and neighbours, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Disguising these “diaries of the night” in code and concealing them in the spines of books from her extensive library, she smuggles them out of the country one by one.
“Dreams are perfect for registering nascent authoritarianism and the ways its repressions actually unfold: not as a single announcement or explosive act but as a steady, growing rumble while the ground beneath your feet begins to shift”
—The Atlantic
Escaping to New York in 1939, reinvention comes at a steep cost. Charlotte fashions her husband’s old lawyer’s robe into a working housecoat and earns a living dyeing the hair of fellow refugees. What was once Berlin’s literary salon culture transforms into a makeshift hair salon in exile. It becomes a gathering place for European émigré intellectuals, including Hannah Arendt. This tight-knit circle forms a space for conversation and connection amid collective loss, preserving fragments of the culture they were forced to leave behind.
Decades later, and as Germany begins to reckon with its past, Charlotte painstakingly reassembles the hidden dream fragments—decoding, organising, and connecting the testimonies she had safeguarded. TheThird Reich of Dreams, finally published in 1966, becomes a landmark work—reframing life under fascism through the hidden world of the unconscious.
Speaker Details:
Amanda Rubin-Lewis is a documentary filmmaker, journalist, and independent scholar working at the intersection of cultural history, music, the arts, and science. Her work has been featured on the BBC, Channel 4, The History Channel, and Discovery+, among other notable channels. Her recent relevant work includes 21st Century Mythologies (BBC), which unpacks the 1957 book Mythologies by French philosopher Roland Barthes, laying bare the myth-making that is at the heart of consumer culture. It was while researching a film about journalist Charlotte Beradt and her unique dream anthology, The Third Reich of Dreams, that Amanda discovered the lost English-language rights to the book. She was the force behind its republication in English in April 2025 by Princeton University Press. Presently, Rubin is making a radio documentary for BBC Radio 4 about the dream collection and the role of psychotherapy under the Nazis. She lives and works in London.
Devorah Baum is a writer, filmmaker and Professor of English Literature at the University of Southampton. She is the author of Feeling Jewish: a book for just about anyone (Yale University Press, 2017), The Jewish Joke (Profile, 2016), and On Marriage (Hamish Hamilton, 2023) and the director of the creative documentary features The New Man (2016) and Husband (2022). Her writing has appeared in various publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian and Granta magazine. In 2025, she published the co-edited (with Stephen Frosh) Routledge International Handbook to Psychoanalysis and Jewish Studies.
About the Programme
Jewish Women's Voices is a collaborative initiative by Kate Kennedy, Director of the ‘Oxford Centre for Life-Writing’, and Vera Fine-Grodzinski, a scholar of Jewish social and cultural history.
The Programme is the first of its kind at any UK academic institution. Launched in October 2023, the Programme celebrates the life-writing of Jewish women often underrepresented in mainstream history accounts. The Programme is a three-term seminar series dedicated to exploring the diverse experiences of Jewish women across centuries, countries, and cultures. Further information about the Programme can be found here.
Further Details and Contacts:
This hybrid event is free and open to all. Registration is recommended for in-person attendance and required for hybrid attendance
The seminar will be recorded and made available on the OCLW website soon after. Registration is not required to access the recording.
Registration will close at 10:30 on 25 November 2025.
Any queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.
Date: 25/11/2025
Time: 14:00 to 15:30
Location: The Buttery, Wolfson College and Online via Zoom
In this seminar, Amanda Rubin-Lewis and Devorah Baum discuss The Third Reich of Dreams, Charlotte Beradt’s recently republished archive of the dreams of Jewish and non-Jewish Berliners living under the Nazi regime.
Out of print in English for over forty years, this remarkable dream archive, which Charlotte risked her life to protect, stands as both testimony and warning—a unique seismograph of history, registering the tremors of totalitarianism through the minds of those who endured it.
“ … an eerie reminder of totalitarianism’s torments, at a time when the world seems to be drifting once again towards darkness”
—Weekend Telegraph
Like the dreams she preserved, Charlotte’s story raises questions that echo today:
Did ordinary Germans realise they were living through a historical nightmare?
Would we recognise the same signs if we were living through them ourselves?
As our own era confronts rising authoritarianism and deepening polarisation, these dreams illuminate the subtle psychological mechanisms of control—how propaganda distorts reality, how we unconsciously conform, and what happens when the distinction between fact and fiction begins to dissolv
About The Third Reich of Dreams:
“… 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, New York Review of Books
Soon after Hitler seized power in January 1933, Berlin-based journalist Charlotte Beradt began having disturbing dreams. Night after night, she finds herself hunted through snow-covered fields, stormtroopers at her heels. Shaken by these nightmares and banned as a Jew from working, she began secretly collecting dreams from her friends and neighbours, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Disguising these “diaries of the night” in code and concealing them in the spines of books from her extensive library, she smuggles them out of the country one by one.
“Dreams are perfect for registering nascent authoritarianism and the ways its repressions actually unfold: not as a single announcement or explosive act but as a steady, growing rumble while the ground beneath your feet begins to shift”
—The Atlantic
Escaping to New York in 1939, reinvention comes at a steep cost. Charlotte fashions her husband’s old lawyer’s robe into a working housecoat and earns a living dyeing the hair of fellow refugees. What was once Berlin’s literary salon culture transforms into a makeshift hair salon in exile. It becomes a gathering place for European émigré intellectuals, including Hannah Arendt. This tight-knit circle forms a space for conversation and connection amid collective loss, preserving fragments of the culture they were forced to leave behind.
Decades later, and as Germany begins to reckon with its past, Charlotte painstakingly reassembles the hidden dream fragments—decoding, organising, and connecting the testimonies she had safeguarded. TheThird Reich of Dreams, finally published in 1966, becomes a landmark work—reframing life under fascism through the hidden world of the unconscious.
Speaker Details:
Amanda Rubin-Lewis is a documentary filmmaker, journalist, and independent scholar working at the intersection of cultural history, music, the arts, and science. Her work has been featured on the BBC, Channel 4, The History Channel, and Discovery+, among other notable channels. Her recent relevant work includes 21st Century Mythologies (BBC), which unpacks the 1957 book Mythologies by French philosopher Roland Barthes, laying bare the myth-making that is at the heart of consumer culture. It was while researching a film about journalist Charlotte Beradt and her unique dream anthology, The Third Reich of Dreams, that Amanda discovered the lost English-language rights to the book. She was the force behind its republication in English in April 2025 by Princeton University Press. Presently, Rubin is making a radio documentary for BBC Radio 4 about the dream collection and the role of psychotherapy under the Nazis. She lives and works in London.
Devorah Baum is a writer, filmmaker and Professor of English Literature at the University of Southampton. She is the author of Feeling Jewish: a book for just about anyone (Yale University Press, 2017), The Jewish Joke (Profile, 2016), and On Marriage (Hamish Hamilton, 2023) and the director of the creative documentary features The New Man (2016) and Husband (2022). Her writing has appeared in various publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian and Granta magazine. In 2025, she published the co-edited (with Stephen Frosh) Routledge International Handbook to Psychoanalysis and Jewish Studies.
About the Programme
Jewish Women's Voices is a collaborative initiative by Kate Kennedy, Director of the ‘Oxford Centre for Life-Writing’, and Vera Fine-Grodzinski, a scholar of Jewish social and cultural history.
The Programme is the first of its kind at any UK academic institution. Launched in October 2023, the Programme celebrates the life-writing of Jewish women often underrepresented in mainstream history accounts. The Programme is a three-term seminar series dedicated to exploring the diverse experiences of Jewish women across centuries, countries, and cultures. Further information about the Programme can be found here.
Further Details and Contacts:
This hybrid event is free and open to all. Registration is recommended for in-person attendance and required for hybrid attendance
The seminar will be recorded and made available on the OCLW website soon after. Registration is not required to access the recording.
Registration will close at 10:30 on 25 November 2025.
Any queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.