Trump Dreams
1.
Charlotte Beradt is the author of Der Dritte Reich des Traums, published Munich in 1966. The book was translated into English as The Third Reich in Dreams, the Nightmares of a Nation 1933 - 1939 in 1968 with an essay by the psychoanalyst and writer Bruno Bettelheim. With Trump’s election to the presidency, this book has regained saliency. For instance, Zadie Smith reviewed the book in The New Review of Books (December 5, 2024) in anticipation of its re-publication in United States scheduled currently for April 2025. The book has been re-issued in German as well.
Beradt, a Jewish journalist, was born in 1907 and died in 1987. With her husband, Martin Beradt, she fled Germany in 1939 and lived for the rest of her life in New York City. She edited the letters of Rosa Luxemburg and translated Hannah Arendt’s essays written in English into German.
Her thesis expressed in The Third Reich of Dreams is that fear of the Nazis, mingled with fascination, infiltrated the dreams of ordinary Germans and colored them in a sinister way. A corrupt and oppressive regime doesn’t only exercise tyranny over our waking lives; it tints and degrades our dreams as well.
2.
I am on a freeway in the bright light of day, traveling between two cities. On the radio, a pop tune is playing. The melody is insistent and memorable. The song is about Gaza. It has a refrain that I have retroactively reconstructed as something like: Gaza is here and Gaza is there / If you look, Gaza is everywhere. And, so, I look toward the horizon expecting to see a serrated range of smashed towers and ruined apartment buildings. But nothing is visible. I’m not sure as to the direction where I would have to look in order to see Gaza but I have the sense that it is close enough to be visible like a mountain on the horizon. I am midway between the city that I have left and the city toward which I am driving.
Gaza is near but occupies another dimension.
(Upon waking, I have the sense that I am driving north between Chicago, which I have left, and Milwaukee. Once I made that drive after eating a heavy lunch in Greektown. The meal oppressed me and I felt drowsy. It was Summer and the landscapes were bright and yellow. A few days ago, Trump announced that the U.S. would take control over the Gaza strip, “clean it out”, and build a luxury community along the sea.)
3.
I have reached my destination, a large seven- or eight-story brick structure that spreads out around a entrance drive; the buildings comprise a horse-shoe shape. The building presents a facade penetrated by parallel courses of dark windows. From some vantages, the structure seems elegant and well-appointed. From other perspectives, the building has a grim, institutional aspect, a bit like a hospital or sanitarium.
Part of structure is a hotel. I have checked in to the hotel, but lost my family. They are somewhere inside the building. I am outside on an errand that can’t be accomplished. Time passes as I wander around outside the building and I am concerned that my family members will be angry or frightened because of my absence.
After what seems to be a long time, I encounter a line of people waiting to enter the part of the huge building to the right of entrance drive, a lane that loops between the two flanking wings to the main, administrative center of the complex. The crowd is very well-dressed and some of the people waiting in line to enter the building are carrying gifts wrapped in bright and shiny paper. There must be a buffet in the building because I can smell cooking. I patiently wait in the line. In this area, the driveway is raised above the adjacent lawns on a concrete overpass. I am surprised to see an open and deep fissure next to the sidewalk on which I am waiting, a frightening crevasse between the lane lifted up on concrete pillars in front of the building and the paved surface where I am standing. If one were inattentive, you might slip between the elevated drive and the sidewalk and plunge into a dark, deep fissure.
And, in fact, the sidewalk where the queue waits becomes more difficult as I inch toward the building’s entrance. The door is suspended high overhead, accessed by steps that rise as separate rectangular pillars each of them six or eight feet high. People are standing on those pillars. You must be vigilant to keep your balance or you would tumble down to serious injury. At last, the person ahead of me strides forward to enter the building. His cowboy boots grip a steep, almost vertical ramp overhead raised up to an entrance that I can’t clearly see.
(The structure has the facade, shape, and grounds of the Glen Lake Sanitarium, a place a mile and a half from my childhood home. When I was a young man, I often took the late bus back from the University of Minnesota. The last stop on the bus-route (12D) was the Sanitarium with its access lane that extended from the County Highway up to the front of the building, flanked on both sides residential wings of the asylum. At that time, the sanitarium, previously built for tuberculosis and, then, polio patients, had been converted into a State Hospital. When the windows of the sanitarium were open, I could hear people moaning and screaming inside the building. The more elegant parts of the building seem to me to be similar to the Calhoun Beach Club, a similar brick building that once been an expensive hotel and that was converted, I think, into condominiums twenty or thirty years ago. (The 12D bus route also passed that place on the way to remote suburb where I lived.) When I was a child, professional wrestling matches were broadcast from the Calhoun Beach Club radio studios. I once attended a 50th wedding anniversary party for some prominent people from Austin sponsored by their children at the Beach Club ballroom. When I toured Monument Valley, our Navajo tour guide stopped at a big red rock formation, probably about seventy feet high and we were invited to get out of the bus and climb up the side of the big reddish and fin-shaped outcrop. I recall how the middle-aged Navajo man’s cowboy boots seemed to grip the surface of the rock so that he strode confidently up to the top of the formation. A Danish tourist, as I recall, made her way half way to the top of the feature, then, panicked, paralyzed where she clung to the steep rock face. She could neither climb higher, nor retreat down the surface of the rock.)
February 9, 2025
