As part of its New Academic Book Series, The Wiener Holocaust Library is pleased to present this Hybrid Book Talk with Historian Lyndsey Stonebridge and Documentary Filmmaker Amanda Rubin who will discuss the work of two remarkable women who understood totalitarianism close up.

In 1933, shortly after Hitler took power, Berlin-journalist Charlotte Beradt began having unsettling dreams She envisioned herself being shot at, tortured and scalped, surrounded by Nazis in disguise, and breathlessly fleeing across fields with storm troopers at her heels. Shaken by these nightmares and banned as a Jew from working, she began secretly collecting dreams from her friends and neighbors, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Disguising these “diaries of the night” in code and concealing them in the spines of books in her extensive library, she sent them as letters to friends abroad, where they waited for her until she escaped in 1939.

By the mid-1950’s Beradt and Hannah Arendt had met and became friends in New York: Beradt translated essays and ‘The Human Condition’ for Arendt, organised her office when she travelled, and was also Arendt’s husband’s lover. Arendt encouraged Beradt to collect the dream accounts, and begin to trace the common symbols and themes that appeared in the collective unconscious of a traumatized nation.

Available again for the first time since its publication in the 1960s, The Third Reich of Dreams brings together this uniquely powerful dream record, offering a visceral understanding of how terror is internalized and how propaganda colonizes the imagination.

Written with passion and authority, Lyndsey Stonebridge’s We Are Free to Change the World illuminates Arendt’s life and work and its urgent dialogue with our troubled present.

About the Speakers

Lyndsey Stonebridge is professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham, UK. She is the author of Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees, winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title; The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg, which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for English Literature; and the essay collection, Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights. We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience was published by Jonathan Cape and the Hogarth Press in January 2024, and was a finalist for the George Orwell Prize in Political Writing. Lyndsey is currently working on a new book Old Women: A History of our Future to be published in 2027. She is a regular media commentator and broadcaster, and lives in London.

Amanda Rubin is a Documentary Director whose work – ranging across cultural history, music, arts, science and observational docs – has been shown on BBC One, Two, Four, Channel 4, Sky, The History Channel, Discovery +, PBS/WGBH and for selective NGO’s. In 2020 she made ‘21st Century Mythologies’ for BBC Four about the life and work of philosopher Roland Barthes. It was whilst researching a feature-documentary about Charlotte Beradt and The Third Reich of Dreams that she discovered the ‘lost’ English language rights to the book, and is now republishing it with Princeton University Press. Alongside the film she is also making a radio documentary for BBC Radio 4 about the dream collection and the role of psychotherapy under the Nazis.

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