The final stop is “Heil, Hitler!”

Since childhood, my grandfather, a scientist from the recently destroyed Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, repeats the same words to me at night: “We have freedom of dreams in our country.” Grandfather knows this saying from his father, a doctor who was arrested by the NKVD in 1938.

Immediately after the start of the war with Ukraine, independent research on the collection and analysis of dreams appeared . The history of these projects goes back to one source - a German book of dreams recorded during the reign of Hitler.

Between 1933 and 1939, the journalist and researcher Charlotte Beradt recorded hundreds of dreams that the inhabitants of the Third Reich had. Beradt carefully hid the collected data - she wrote them down in secret notebooks, encrypted all the "political" details. In her notes, the party was called the "family", Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler - "Uncle Gustav, Uncle Hans and Uncle Gerhard." Realizing that even such a recording was unlikely to prevent arrest in the event of a serious check, for several years she sent letters retelling her dreams to friends abroad.

Shortly after the start of the war, in the autumn of 1939, Beradt managed to escape from Germany. For the first time, some fragments of her research came out in the mid-1940s, in America. And almost 30 years later, an analysis of all the material she collected was published as a separate book: The Third Reich of Dreams. Now it reads like a study of the fears, hopes and desires of people who fell asleep and suddenly found themselves citizens of an aggressor country.

The first dreams are dreams about the loss of self-respect, the loss of oneself. A successful entrepreneur sees Goebbels inspecting his factory, and he himself, to his shame, tries to throw out his hand in a Nazi salute - but he can’t, his hand doesn’t go up. After terrible physical effort, at the very end of sleep, he still manages to throw a ridge. “I don’t need that greeting from you,” the chief Nazi propagandist replies contemptuously.

This is a dream of double impotence, double suffering, comments Beradt. The person who sees him simultaneously reproaches himself for trying to be a “good German” and showing loyalty, and for the fact that he does not succeed even in a dream. The man who had the dream was very proud of his factory, but lost it a few years after the Nazis came to power.

The woman in her dream experiences public condemnation: she refuses to shout "Heil!" along with others. Running away from the crowd, she jumps into the bus. When she asks a neighbor where they are going, he replies that the final stop is "Heil, Hitler!".

The need to compromise with the society that accepted Hitler, and with oneself, an attempt to resolve the contradiction between the inability to protest and the inability to join, corroded many. According to Beradt, these feelings tormented the people of her circle in Germany after 1933 most of all.

Another leitmotif of the dreams was related to the fear of surveillance. Two unrelated young women saw and told Beradt dreams that were similar in some details. The first was frightened by the chimney sweep, who, pointing to the stove with a chimney, said to her: "Your fault is beyond doubt." When she woke up, she immediately thought that there was a recording device hidden in her stove. The second heard a retelling of her own conversations in a dream and realized that she was being overheard by a home table lamp.

After Hitler came to power, writes Beradt, one of the first in Germany began to restrict the freedom of private independent judgment, simple, not even political expression. The horror was not even in the fact that you “know that they are listening to you”, but in the fact that you don’t know “when they listen and when they don’t”. Endless suspicion, lack of confidence in themselves and their loved ones deprived people of the strength to think and speak. With each year of Hitler's rule, people increasingly lost the connection between the reality around them and the ability to judge it with at least some degree of certainty, to perform an independent action.

A middle-aged man, talking to his brother on the phone, said, "I can't enjoy anything else." That same night, he had a dream: he was receiving a call from a certain Call Check Service. At the same moment, he realizes that depression in the Third Reich is a crime, and tries to ask for forgiveness, but they are silent on the phone.

Another man in a dream suddenly heard on the radio about a new decree "on the abolition of the walls." After that, the room became transparent, and the man realized that all his actions, all thoughts would henceforth be known to "who needs it."

Another person, probably of Jewish origin, saw in a dream in front of him "two passports" that could give him the desired opportunity to escape. Then the dream developed as follows: “Having held them in my hands, after an internal struggle, I put them back, thinking that I should not do anything that could badly affect the lives of the rest of the people of my ethnic group - since I know that all of them will answer for this is my action."

Dreams that are especially important for Beradt are those that she singles out as premonitions of future events. A man sees himself in a dream "alive in a pit, buried under a mountain of dead bodies." Another dreams of stormtroopers breaking shop windows, long before the events of Kristallnacht . In interpreting these plots, the researcher appeals to Freud's classical theory that dreams function as "wish fulfillment".

Beradt's book offered a new look at the main discussion in post-war Germany - about guilt, responsibility, about the knowledge or ignorance of "ordinary Germans" about what is happening at the front and in concentration camps. Even those who thought they "didn't know" felt and understood more than they could admit to themselves. Their dreams were not evidence of their guilt, but evidence of participation in a common life, in the creation of a world that made possible the crimes that had happened. Hitler also did not immediately become Hitler: in Beradt's book, his role is primarily the embodiment of universal fears and desires. He is both a character and the owner of other people's dreams. As the psychologist and former prisoner of Buchenwald Bruno Bettelheim writes in the afterword, one of the most terrible properties of National Socialism was manifested in the fact that “even in a dream these people did not have freedom”

Cover photo: Marketa, Flickr