Charlotte Beradt

Charlotte Beradt (born Charlotte Aron, 7 December 1901 or 1907 – 15 May 1986) was a German American journalist and translator, best known for her 1966 book collecting the dreams of German citizens under Adolf Hitler, The Third Reich of Dreams, and her translations of the work of Hannah Arendt.

Life and work Charlotte Beradt was born to a Jewish family in Forst (Lausitz) in southeastern Brandenburg in 1901 or 1907. She was the second child of Victor Leo Aron (26 September 1871 – 16 April 1928), a businessman who owned a factory across the German border in Poland, and Margarethe Behrendt Aron (28 April 1876 – 1 April 1942). The family moved to Berlin when she was five years old.

When she finished school in 1919, she joined Berlin publisher S. Fischer Verlag as an administrative assistant and apprentice, where she worked closely with Oskar Loerke and met lawyer-judge and writer Martin Beradt (1881–1949) whom she dated briefly and who later became her second husband.

In 1924, she married the journalist and author Heinz Pol (born Heinz Pollak, 1901–1972), an editor and film critic for Vossische Zeitung. (She left the party after the Moscow trials.

Under the Third Reich Like many Jewish leftists, Beradt and Pol were targeted by the police. The night of the Reichstag fire, the Sturmabteilung broke into the couple's apartment and seized it. Both Beradt and Pol were arrested in the wake of the Reichstag Fire. Beradt was set free, and within days obtained the release of Heinz Pol. Decree. Pol subsequently fled to Prague. Charlotte moved in with Martin Beradt in Charlottenburg. However, she continued to covertly print and circulate KDP leaflets and literature.

Life in the United States The Beradts married in July 1938.

In New York, they were initially completely penniless, and Martin's worsening blindness meant that she initially earned a living for them both, working as a hairdresser out of their apartment on West End Avenue. She also produced radio programs for public broadcaster WRD, including its flagship daily show Kritisches Tagebuch. In 1973, she produced a radio show about Rosa Luxemburg and edited a volume of Luxemburg's correspondence.

Work with Hannah Arendt Beradt met Arendt through her husband, Heinrich Blücher, after the pair arrived in New York in May 1941.

She translated four of Arendt's English-language lectures delivered between 1953 and 1956 into German, published in 1957 under the title Fragwürdige Traditionsbestände im politischen Denken der Gegenwart ("Questionable Traditions in Contemporary Political Thought"). In addition, she translated an Arendt essay on Karl Jaspers for publication that same year.

She died in New York City in 1986.

The Third Reich of Dreams Charlotte Beradt's best-known work is the 1966 book The Third Reich of Dreams, a compendium of the dreams of everyday Germans under the rising authoritarianism of the Nazi regime, which Beradt collected from 1933 to 1939.

Beradt began collecting dreams about persecution and authoritarianism in early 1933. In February of that year, a friend told Beradt that he'd dreamed of meeting Joseph Goebbels at work and struggling to salute him. (He is known in The Third Reich of Dreams as "Mr. S.") Between 1933 and 1939, she collected some 300 dreams. She hid them inside bookbindings, which she then sent to friends abroad for safekeeping, including to Heinz Pol in Prague.

A first selection of the dreams she'd collected while living in Berlin appeared in an English-language article in Free World in 1943.

The resulting book, which collected only a fraction of the dreams, was published in German in 1966 as Das Dritte Reich des Traums. It was, Beradt later related, incredibly unpopular: "the book received an enormous amount of criticism, did not sell at all, and was later offered on the clearance sale table."

Since then, due in no small part to the efforts of historian Reinhart Koselleck, who contributed an essay to the second German edition of the book in 1981, The Third Reich of Dreams has gained esteem as an important document of authoritarianism and an influential text for psychoanalysts, philosophers, and historians. Out of print in English for many years, the publication rights presumed lost, The Third Reich of Dreams was republished by Princeton University Press in a new English translation by Damion Searls, with a foreword by Dunya Mikhail, in 2025.

In popular culture A documentary on Beradt's life, titled The Third Reich of Dreams, is under production. Director Amanda Rubin has received funding support from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future, and the German Federal Ministry of Finance; in 2024, Rubin was Filmmaker in Residence at the Jewish Film Institute, where she worked on the project. In researching the film, Rubin located the English-language rights to The Third Reich of Dreams, allowing for its 2025 republication.