The Dream of the Raised Arm

Born in 1907 in Forst, Germany, a town near the Polish border, Charlotte Beradt was a young journalist who reported on women’s issues and other aspects of German social and political life for the weekly journal Die Weltbühne. In 1933 Beradt, a committed communist and a Jew, found herself suddenly unemployed. As the Nazi movement grew, she began having nightmares every night.

She wondered whether other people were having similar dreams. She started to ask people about their dreams, discreetly: “I asked the dressmaker, the neighbor, an aunt, a milkman, a friend, almost always without revealing my purpose.” She did this because “dreams like this should be preserved for posterity,” and she wrote down hundreds before fleeing to New York in 1939. There she worked as a hairdresser for fellow émigrés, sometimes spending time with her friend Hannah Arendt.

In 1966 she finally brought her collection together, arranging the dreams by theme, offering her own light commentary, and bolstering each short chapter with epigraphs from the likes of Kafka and Brecht and Arendt herself. She gave the resulting slim volume a memorable title: The Third Reich of Dreams. The book had some modest success but never penetrated the American consciousness like the work of Arendt, perhaps because Beradt offers us not a complex hermeneutics of totalitarianism but rather a quite straightforward picture of the psychological effects of propaganda and manipulation upon a populace.

There is nothing submerged or especially Freudian in The Third Reich of Dreams. The dreams sort of interpret themselves:

Goebbels came to my factory. He had all the employees line up in two rows, left and right, and I had to stand between the rows and give a Nazi salute. It took me half an hour to get my arm raised, millimeter by millimeter. Goebbels watched my efforts like a play, without any sign of appreciation and displeasure, but when I finally had my arm up, he spoke five words: “I don’t want your salute.” Then he turned around and walked to the door. So there I was in my own factory, among my own people, pilloried with my arm raised. The only way I was physically able to keep standing there was by fixing my eyes on his clubfoot as he limped out. I stood like that until I woke up.

Beradt wonders what to call the factory owner’s dream. The Dream of the Raised Arm? The Dream of Remaking the Individual?

The fact that the factory owner crumbled without resistance, but also without his downfall having any purpose or meaning, makes his dream a perfect parable for the creation of the submissive totalitarian subject.

The book is full of such parables.

How does one become a totalitarian subject? What—aside from the threat of violence—are the necessary conditions? These are questions Beradt’s dreaming people daren’t ask themselves in the cold light of day, but the queries reappear under cover of night. Here is the dream of a forty-five-year-old doctor, a year into the establishment of the Third Reich:

At around nine o’clock, after my workday was done and I was about to relax on the sofa with a book on Matthias Grünewald, the walls of my room, of my whole apartment, suddenly disappeared. I looked around in horror and saw that none of the apartments as far as the eye could see had any walls left. I heard a loudspeaker blare: “Per Wall Abolition Decree dated the 17th of this month.”… Now that the apartments are totally public, I’m living on the bottom of the sea in order to remain invisible.

“Life Without Walls,” Beradt points out, could “easily be the title not just of this chapter, but of a novel or academic study about life under totalitarianism.” As for the doctor, he is perfectly aware of why he dreamed that dream: the day before, in his waking life, the block warden of his neighborhood had come by to ask why he hadn’t hung up a flag. “I reassured him and offered him a glass of liquor, but to myself I thought: ‘Not on my four walls…not on my four walls.’” But when one is a totalitarian subject there is no more “to myself I thought.” A life without walls is a life without privacy, without the ability to consider or even really know anymore what one feels or thinks when not under the eye of the block warden. It is a life in which the burden of thought has been delegated to the collective, and the public sphere is no longer a plurality of ideas but a place where one gets in line. “I was sitting in a box at the opera,” one woman reports.

They were performing my favorite opera, The Magic Flute. After the line “That is the devil, certainly,” a squad of policemen marched in and headed straight toward me, their footsteps ringing out loud and clear. They had discovered by using some kind of machine that I had thought about Hitler when I heard the word “devil.” I looked around at all the dressed-up people in the audience, pleading for help with my eyes, but they all just stared straight ahead, mute and expressionless, with not a single face showing even any pity. Actually, the older gentleman in the box next to mine looked kind and elegant, but when I tried to catch his eye he spat at me.

The same woman also has a book burning dream. She is trying to save Schiller’s Don Carlos from the flames by hiding it under the bed. The storm troopers storm in, find it, and throw it on a truck that is heading for a book burning—at exactly the moment she realizes it’s not Don Carlos but only an atlas. She lets them take it—and still feels immensely guilty. In retelling this dream, she adds: “I’ve read in a foreign newspaper that during a performance of Don Carlos the crowd had burst into applause at the line ‘O give us freedom of thought.’”

In the dreams she has collected, Beradt notices a commonality:

Very different people all hit upon the same code for describing a hidden phenomenon of the environment: the atmosphere of total indifference created by environmental pressure and utterly strangling the public sphere. When asked if she had any idea what the thought-reading machine in her dream was like, the woman answered: “Yes, it was electrical, a maze of wires…” She came up with this symbol of psychological and bodily control, of ever-present possible surveillance, of the infiltration of machines into the course of events…fifteen years before 1984 was even published.

And seventy years before Meta.

In a life without walls, anything you say can and may be taken down in evidence against you by anyone or anything at any time. The Third Reich of Dreams is filled with talking objects spilling secrets: a stove that starts speaking in a “shrill, penetrating voice,” revealing all the bad things people in the kitchen have said about the regime, or a lamp that won’t stop talking “like a military officer…. Again, I felt desperately worried, at the mercy of that shrill voice that never stopped talking, even though no one was there to arrest me.” Rather than wait to be indicted by this “shrill” voice, many dreamers just indict themselves, submitting to the nonsense of the propaganda by embodying it:

I dreamed that I was talking in my dream and to be safe was speaking Russian. (I don’t speak any Russian, and also I never talk in my sleep.) I was speaking Russian so that I wouldn’t understand myself and no one else would understand me either.

And these dreams of autoimprisonment in language, Beradt argues, illustrate

the dark shape that these people’s “consent” takes. They show how people, in blind fear of the hunter, start to play the hunter themselves, as well as the prey; how they secretly help set and spring the very traps that are meant to catch them.

Propaganda posters, megaphones, the radio: such devices appear in these dreams over and over. And such were the paltry propaganda tools Hitler turned to his advantage in spectacular fashion, though they were like crayons on paper compared with what a man like Elon Musk now has at his disposal. Usually, when people are making comparisons between now and then, they are thinking of the message and not the medium—that is, they think of Nazism itself, as a specific political ideology. The Third Reich of Dreams certainly provides many predictable parallels. Take the young woman “with very dark hair” who has a “school dream in which all the dark-haired people formed a group of ‘Disreputables’”:

The rumor was that an official list had turned up with the names of everyone belonging to the “Disreputables” in every grade. The cause of these measures was also written in the document: We had dared to write a letter to the others, the “reputable” blonds, over a book we’d loaned them and wanted back. But that wasn’t our actual crime, it was that we dark-haired people had written to the blonds at all. Then we all fled for our lives. They threw stones at me.

In Beradt’s view, this dream provides

insights into the fact that emphasizing natural differences, creating artificial ones, defining elite groups and inhuman groups and then playing one off against the other are basic principles of totalitarian regimes.

Of course, Beradt was making these conclusions in 1966, when they still felt relatively new. We’ve known for a long time that such fascist politicking is one possible response to economic inequality and resentment, another being the progressive socialist economic populism offered by a candidate like Bernie Sanders. We know all that.

What strikes me, reading these dreams in 2024, is the more structural conclusions Beradt makes about consent, submission, and the manipulation of minds. Any attempt to make an analogy between our benighted political era and fascist Germany will always find itself struggling to assimilate or explain away anomalous data like the significant support of minorities for Trump, or the repulsion, this time around, of the bourgeoisie. (Though in both cases, as the dreams reveal, a surprising proportion of women are apparently compelled by the concept of the political strongman.) The most useful analogy, to my mind, concerns the mediums through which all this ideology was conveyed—that is, the propaganda machine itself, a multipronged process the Germans called Gleichschaltung. The literal translation is “synchronizing,” in the sense of “imposing mandatory conformity.”

Perhaps the biggest difference between the right and the left in the past fifteen years has been in their understanding of Gleichschaltung. In place of the megaphone, the radio, and the printing press, antiprogressive forces are now making excellent use of the greatest propaganda tool ever invented: the algorithm. For while the elites on the right have understood from the outset the ways in which algorithms can be used to “impose mandatory conformity” on a population, the hubristic elites on the left apparently really believed that although they, too, were participating in the exact same global behavior modification experiment, only those other people, the “deplorables,” had been truly affected by it. Other people had been converted to the dark side. Other people had brain-rot or were red-pilled. We meanwhile were just expressing our sincere political opinions.¹ At least red-pilling contributes to the vote count. The dark comedy of it all is that large sections of the left only really successfully applied Gleichschaltung to themselves.

A young student’s dream:

People were attacking my boyfriend and I didn’t help him, and then he was carried off on a stretcher…. But his body was a skeleton, except for one bloody scrap of flesh still hanging from where his neck was…. I said to myself as consolation: “But this is just propaganda, it’s an anti-Hitler poster from before.” (There had been an antifascist poster in 1932 depicting a skeleton.)

This dream, writes Beradt, is

a good example of the process of inversion at work in propaganda…. She began by using her enemies’ arguments “to prevent the worst from happening,” and ended up deciding that atrocities were only counter-propaganda. As we all know, propaganda is subject to no legal or moral restraints—it is capable of almost anything and can make events happen whenever it needs them to happen. It can also, however, as we see here in its early beginnings, infiltrate the people it’s directed at, until here too the boundaries between propagandist and victim of propaganda gradually dissolve, and suggestion becomes autosuggestion.

Autosuggestion occurs when you no longer need a block warden to tell you to hang your flag. You hang it because everybody else has.

A series of dreams in a chapter called “Veiled Wishes, or ‘Destination: Heil Hitler’” illustrates this point. In one, a man is trying not to laugh at a lot of people sitting at a very long table in a train dining car, all of them singing a ridiculous political song for “National Unity Day.” He can’t stop being amused. But being amused singles him out. He wants to remain a part of the collective, so he keeps moving tables to try and disguise his laughter. Then he thinks, “Maybe if you’re singing along, it isn’t so silly, so I sang along.” In another example a man finds Goering’s brown leather vest and crossbow to be utterly absurd until, a moment later, he finds he is standing right next to Goering, and is now wearing the same vest and crossbow, and has at this very moment been elevated to the position of Goering’s bodyguard.

Yet another man dreams the most condensed version of all these accounts: “I dreamed I said: ‘I don’t have to always say No anymore.’”

I cannot improve on Beradt’s interpretation: “This fairy-tale formulation ‘don’t have to anymore’…shows yet again what a ‘struggle’ it is to be ‘opposed’: Freedom is a burden, unfreedom comes as a relief.” (My italics.) We rarely talk about the temptations of unfreedom. Yet we experience them every day. How hard is it not to go all the way to the right (or the left) with your followers and subscribers when they do? How impossible is it to be the lone outlier? How difficult is it not to take any argument to its purest and most rigid conclusion if everyone in your timeline appears to be already there and has already signed the petition?

False flag operations. Disproportionate cultural panics. Disproportion generally. Censorship. Self-censorship. Conspiracies. Deep dives. Doing your own research. Keeping receipts. Putting you on blast. Registering your deafening silence. Living in bubbles. Living in echo chambers. Let that sink in. #Nuance. Team Fact. Team Feeling. For the past fifteen years we have—all of us—been subjected to a truly monumental network of psychological influence that our governments have failed to regulate in any real way whatsoever. Just as it was in the Thirties, our version of the propaganda megaphone is “subject to no legal or moral restraints.” Maybe it’s time that it is?

The Third Reich of Dreams is about to be republished in English, this time with a new foreword written by Dunya Mikhail, an Iraqi poet who fled her country in 1995. Here is a writer who has known propaganda, who has known censorship, who has experienced intimidation both psychological and physical. Perhaps as a consequence she writes with the blunt clarity of a woman determined to say exactly what she means:

I Was in a Hurry

Yesterday I lost a country.
I was in a hurry,
and didn’t notice when it fell from me
like a broken branch from a forgetful tree.
Please, if anyone passes by
and stumbles across it,
perhaps in a suitcase
open to the sky,
or engraved on a rock
like a gaping wound,
or wrapped
in the blankets of emigrants,
or canceled
like a losing lottery ticket…²

Poem as bad dream. Speaking of bad dreams, as I type this it is Tuesday, November 5, 2024, and I happen to be on a plane crossing the Atlantic. What exactly am I flying into? There’s no Wi-Fi on this plane, so I am in a Schrödinger’s cat sort of situation—a dreamscape if you will—in which Trump has won and not won, and keeps on winning and not winning, as I sit suspended over the clouds. And even this odd fact is a sort of recurring dream, for eight years ago I went to bed in New York and woke up the day after election day and had to fly to Germany, dumbfounded. What was I flying out of?

On that day, up in the sky, I wrote an essay, “On Optimism and Despair,” mostly because I did not want to be entirely enveloped by the latter emotion, as strong as it was in me at that moment.³ This time it’s different. Optimism has pretty much left the scene. Win or lose, the “life without walls” has become general, no one need shout at us in a shrill voice through a megaphone—we keep the communication channel permanently open in our back pockets—and if our transformation into the passive subjects of a strongman doesn’t happen this time around, it will happen soon. It’s already happened. “We used to have to adjust a few things by hand,” explains the Officer in Kafka’s infamous penal colony. “But from now on the machine will work all by itself.”

But no, that’s not quite right either: I still have a shred of optimism. I still believe that a generation will arrive who will wake us from our digitally modified slumber, at which point we will all climb out of our individual machines, the better to observe them from the outside, walk around them, study their mechanisms and operations, and then decide, collectively, on some regulations regarding their proper use. Sometimes I think that generation is already here.

Recently, in Barcelona, I found myself in a hall addressing four hundred fourteen-year-olds. I was meant to be talking to them about fiction, but every question they asked was about social media. Every single question. And they were in earnest. It surprised me! The tone was urgent. Feeling myself to be in a safe space with walls, I tried something out on them, an idea I normally never say out loud because of how cringe it is. The sort of idea that reeks of utopian optimism and that nobody serious has gone anywhere near in the past fifteen years. And to speak in such a way in front of a hall full of teens? Truly like something from a waking nightmare. But there they all were, sitting in front of me, filled with this surprising and unexpected urgency, so I just said it.

I began as follows: in a hypercapitalist economy—one that has found a way to monetize human attention itself—we are the product. Well, sure, everybody knows that by now, even the fourteen-year-olds. But within this fact does there not lurk the not-so-hidden possibility of a radical and thrillingly simple act of resistance? Think about it (I said, to the fourteen-year-olds). With every other extractive and exploitative industry of the past four hundred years, the process of unraveling and resistance was far more complicated. To end the racialized system of capital called “slavery,” for example, you had to violently revolt, riot, petition, boycott, change minds, change laws, all in order to end one of the most lucrative gravy trains the Western world has ever known. To rein in the unprecedented wealth of the robber baron industrialists at the turn of the twentieth century, you had to regulate their businesses, the banks, and the labor laws themselves, and create the electoral majorities needed to do so. But to seriously damage the billionaire empires that have been built on your attention and are now manipulating your democracies? To achieve that right now? All you guys would need to do is look away. And thus give a new meaning to the word woke.

There’s a bracing moment in The Third Reich of Dreams when Beradt reminds us that “the destruction of plurality” as well as the feeling of “loneliness in public spaces” was how Hannah Arendt characterized “the basic quality of totalitarian subjects.” These are also fair descriptions of the effects of our present algorithmic existence. That of course does not mean that simply by disengaging from the algorithms we will make all our real-world problems disappear. Doing so will not solve climate change, end profound economic inequality, destroy racism and misogyny or bolster reproductive rights, end wars cultural and real, or magically transform the plight of migrants. But it might hasten the end of the misguided belief that self-selecting, yet algorithmically determined, online communities are any decent political substitute for geographic, localized, politically diverse, real-world communities. It might help to reinstate a less manipulated, more public, more shared place of debate, in which the possibility of actually knowing and at least partially comprehending your neighbor and their political leanings (rather than caricaturing and demonizing them) could re-emerge as a real political possibility. Which might in turn result in newly invigorated powers of concession, compromise, and consensus, all of which—whether you like it or not—happen to be vital for any healthy polis. That’s a whole lot of “mights.” But in my dream, it’s worth a try, if only because it would so seriously hobble the most powerful and dangerous political lobbyists on the present scene: the tech bros. In my nightmares, Trump is only the Trojan horse. Musk is the real power. An unelected billionaire whose megaphone reaches every corner of the globe? O give us freedom of thought.