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Charlotte Beradt (born Charlotte Aron, 7 December 1901 or 1907 – 15 May 1986) was a German American journalist and translator, best known for her 1966 book collecting the dreams of German citizens under Adolf Hitler, The Third Reich of Dreams, and her translations of the work of Hannah Arendt.
When she finished school in 1919, she joined Berlin publisher S. Fischer Verlag as an administrative assistant and apprentice, where she worked closely with Oskar Loerke and met lawyer-judge and writer Martin Beradt (1881–1949) whom she dated briefly and who later became her second husband.
In 1924, she married the journalist and author Heinz Pol (born Heinz Pollak, 1901–1972), an editor and film critic for Vossische Zeitung. The two were members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and the Spartacus League, where she met (and may have had an affair with) Heinrich Blücher, who later married Hannah Arendt. (She left the party after the Moscow trials.) She gained her first journalistic experience as a freelance contributor to various daily newspapers and magazines, including Dresdner Nachrichten, Weltbühne, Die Dame, and Tempo. With Heinz Pol, she edited and translated Charlie Chaplin's European travelogue into German, publishing it in 1928.
In New York, they were initially completely penniless, and Martin's worsening blindness meant that she initially earned a living for them both, working as a hairdresser out of their apartment on West End Avenue. Her customers included many German exiles (e.g., Bella Rosenfeld, Elisabeth Bergner) who found in the makeshift salon a strong sense of community; one client, Gerda Meyerhoff, later remembered, "It was the most literary hair-dyeing experience I have ever experienced. "The conversation was so interesting, it was such a literary environment with such clever women; the most incredible women were always coming and going."
The Beradts became American citizens in August 1946. Martin Beradt died in November 1949. In the years that followed, Charlotte began writing and reporting again. Her articles, including dozens of film and theater reviews, appeared in various German and German-language newspapers and magazines, including Deutsche Zeitung, Christ und Welt, Frankfurter Rundschau, and Aufbau. She wrote about 75 film and theater reviews for Aufbau and Frankfurter Rundschau. She also produced radio programs for public broadcaster WRD, including its flagship daily show Kritisches Tagebuch. She was particularly interested in reporting on the American civil rights movement, producing WRD stories on Adam Clayton Powell, Marcus Garvey, and Father Divine.
In 1969, she published a biography of the social democratic and communist politician Paul Levi, who was a personal friend, and released a volume of his collected essays and speeches. In 1973, she produced a radio show about Rosa Luxemburg and edited a volume of Luxemburg's correspondence.
She translated four of Arendt's English-language lectures delivered between 1953 and 1956 into German, published in 1957 under the title Fragwürdige Traditionsbestände im politischen Denken der Gegenwart ("Questionable Traditions in Contemporary Political Thought"). In addition, she translated an Arendt essay on Karl Jaspers for publication that same year. She also translated Arendt's English-language essay "Totalitarian Imperialism: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution" into German, and it was published under the title Die Ungarische Revolution und der totalitäre Imperialismus in 1958.
She died in New York City in 1986.
Beradt began collecting dreams about persecution and authoritarianism in early 1933. In February of that year, a friend told Beradt that he'd dreamed of meeting Joseph Goebbels at work and struggling to salute him. (He is known in The Third Reich of Dreams as "Mr. S.") This led her to begin "systematically collecting the reports of dreams under dictatorship." Between 1933 and 1939, she collected some 300 dreams.
Beradt collected the dreams secretly, writing notes in coded language, e.g., referring to figures like Hitler in familial formulations like "Uncle Hans" and calling an "arrest" a case of the flu. She hid them inside bookbindings, which she then sent to friends abroad for safekeeping, including to Heinz Pol in Prague.
A first selection of the dreams she'd collected while living in Berlin appeared in an English-language article in Free World in 1943. In 1962, she met the journalist Roland Wiegenstein while visiting Karl Otten in Locarno, Switzerland, and the two began collaborating on "Träume im Terror" ("Dreams in Terror"), a radio story about the dreams that aired on WDR in 1963. After the broadcast, editor Martin Gregor-Dellin invited her to write a book on the dreams for Nymphenburger Verlag, an independent publisher that had also published the verdicts of the Nuremberg trials, the newspaper Der Ruf, and the work of Klaus Mann.
The resulting book, which collected only a fraction of the dreams, was published in German in 1966 as Das Dritte Reich des Traums. It was, Beradt later related, incredibly unpopular: "the book received an enormous amount of criticism, did not sell at all, and was later offered on the clearance sale table." When the first English translation was published by Quadrangle Books in 1968, the accompanying essay by the Holocaust survivor and psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim complained that Beradt had only captured the "manifest content, that is, what the dreamer spontaneously remembered"--insufficient, he said, for drawing more than "educated guesswork" about the deeper, latent meanings of the dreams.
Since then, due in no small part to the efforts of historian Reinhart Koselleck, who contributed an essay to the second German edition of the book in 1981, The Third Reich of Dreams has gained esteem as an important document of authoritarianism and an influential text for psychoanalysts, philosophers, and historians.
The book also been translated into French, Croatian, Portuguese, Catalan, Spanish, and Italian. Out of print in English for many years, the publication rights presumed lost, The Third Reich of Dreams was republished by Princeton University Press in a new English translation by Damion Searls, with a foreword by Dunya Mikhail, in 2025. (2026). 9780691243511, Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691243511
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