We need to be careful not to become obsessed with Trump or his authoritarian streak. Why not? Because it can result in nightmares with him camped out in our dreams-nightmares - not just outer reality. So argues Charlotte Beradt in her Third Reich Of Dreams, which documents over a 6-year period how the Nazis and Hitler's dictatorship slowly colonized the unconscious of millions of Germans. In effect, the Third Reich's persecutions and propaganda had seeped into the last refuge of the private self: dreams.
These unsettling findings in respect of Beradt's work were recently the focus of a WSJ book review, 'Nightmares Around The Clock', May 17-18, p. C12, by Benjami Balint. He indeed opens by quoting her own words after writing:
"One night in 1933, after Hitler had taken power, a Jewish journalist in Berlin awoke from uneasy dreams, drenched in sweat. 'The thought occurred to me', she later wrote,
'that I might not be the only one among thousands and thousands to be condemned to such dreams by the dictatorship. The things that filled my dreams must fill theirs too - breathless flight across fields, hiding at the top of towers dizzying height, cowering down below in graves - everywhere the Storm troopers at my heels."
Heady stuff, but is it real, as in real dreams? The WSJ reviewer clearly believes they were, noting: "By the time she fled Germany in 1939, Beradt had smuggled out a unique archive of inner life under tyranny. After the war, in New York, she shaped these oneiric fragments into a potent volume, 'The Third Reich of Dreams'.:
Mr. Balint is also careful to point out the dreams recorded "are not symptoms of early neurosis or early childhood experiences." They were, in fact, "revelatory account of despotism internalized."
I can believe it because my late German friend Kurt Braun - who had been forced into the Hitler Youth at age ten - recalled years of such dreams after the war. Mostly being lined up for the Fuhrer's inspection, and then not saying 'Heil Hitler!' fast enough.
As he told us on our first visit to his home in Frankfurt-Am-Mein in 1978:
"The dreams, usually nightmares, arrived almost every night. Finally, I realized on becoming a grown man the only way to fend off these night demons was to gather archival films of what the Nazis actually did."
The strategy worked, as he essentially banished the Hitler dictatorship occupation from his unconscious, transferring them to the conscious mind via films. (He showed us several of them, and they were not for the squeamish.)
When one reads the WSJ review, and in particular the first sentence from the paragraph near the end of the third column: "Several Germans described to Beradt dreams in which dreaming itself had been outlawed."
One wonders if this wasn't also Kurt's experience and what really drove him to collect dozens of archival reels of the time. Well, look at it this way, his dreams might have been "outlawed"- but not watching the archival films in objective reality.
Balint's words at the end of his review are worth considering:
"Her book's involuntary testimonies are dictated, so to speak, by a particular dictatorship. But in our own moment of renewed anxiety about authoritarian impulses worldwide, they make us wonder:
What happens when the dreams are no longer fully our own? The leastwe can do is read this singular document with our eyes open."
See Also:
by Jeffrey C. Isaac | June 14, 2025 - 4:45am | permalink
The Trump administration has proceeded, and is proceeding, at a furious pace to employ executive power attack and undermine central pillars of American democracy, rendering a system already threadbare and fragile even more weakened.
This past week’s deployment of National Guard troops, and then U.S. Marines, on the streets of Los Angeles, in defiance of California Governor Gavin Newsome and LA Mayor Karen Bass, is but the latest example.
Tomorrow—Saturday, June 14—the administration is planning an enormous military parade on the streets of Washington, D.C., to celebrate “Flag Day,” the U.S. Army, and especially to celebrate Trump and his birthday.
And:
by Heather Digby Parton | June 15, 2025 - 5:25am | permalink
In March 2024, Donald Trump hosted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at Mar-a-Lago. After years of receiving praise and pilgrimages from the American right, the autocrat had begun appearing at conservative events in the U.S. Instead of visiting the White House to see then-President Joe Biden, Orbán spoke at the Heritage Foundation — the conservative think tank behind Project 2025 — before heading to Florida. “He’s a non-controversial figure," Trump told a crowd at Mar-a-Lago upon Orbán's arrival, "because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss.”
Trump loves that.
Orbán's Hungarian regime has often been characterized as modern authoritarianism or a "hybrid regime of electoral autocracy," one in which power is accumulated by the ruling party over time through creative quasi-legal means. He focused on transforming institutions by changing election laws, allowing him to create legislative supermajorities while winning a mere plurality of the vote. He packed the courts with loyalists, found friendly oligarchs to buy up independent media and took over universities — or forced them to close down. He hammered on culture war issues of immigration, nationalism and family values.
And:
The Insidious Danger Of Propaganda And How It Has Infected Brains And Threatened Our Democracy
And:
Archival Photos Remind Us That Book Burning Launched Third Reich's Savagery In 1930s
And:
No comments:
Post a Comment