Amanda Rubin talks to Gwenan Edwards

Film director Amanda Rubin describes how her research for a film about a unique dream collection gathered in 1930s Nazi Germany by Berlin journalist Charlotte Beradt led to the republication of Beradt’s extraordinary book in English after it had been out of print for 40 years.

The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation chronicles the dreams or ordinary Berliners, Jews and non-Jews, revealing how fear, propaganda and surveillance invaded even the most private spaces of people’s lives. Beradt, a prolific journalist and Communist activist, began having unsettling dreams after Hitler came to power in 1933. She imagined herself being shot at, tortured and scalped, and secretly began to ask others about their ‘diaries-of-the-night’. Writing them in code, she hid them in the spines of books in her extensive library, then sent them as letters to a friend abroad. In 1939 she escaped to New York, setting up ‘the most literary of hair salons’ in her basement apartment for emigre friends, including Hannah Arendt, for whom she later translated. In the 1960s she found her voice as a writer again, publishing this unique contribution to Holocaust literature and the history of mind-control. 

Rubin is in the late stages of developing an expressionist-animated film based on rare archival footage, verbatim testimony and the dreams. While researching the film, she discovered the lost English rights to Beradt’s book.

Rubin is a documentary filmmaker and journalist. Her work includes Danceworks for BBC Four, films for Channel 4’s Cutting Edge and The New Russia for Channel 4. Here she talks to journalist and former BBC News presenter Gwenan Edwards,  whose credits include the Proms, BBC World, BBC News Channel and BBC Cardiff Singer of the World. She now trains broadcast journalists worldwide and is pursuing a PhD on public service media and Celtic languages.

Part of the festival’s programme of Jewish and Hebrew literature and culture.