Unfree Minds: How Nazi Germany Perfected the Art of Inducing Fear – by Charlotte Beradt – May 1, 2025

Via Princeton University Press

Unfree Minds: How Nazi Germany Perfected the Art of Inducing Fear
Charlotte Beradt on the Effects of Totalitarian Terror on the Human Psyche
By Charlotte Beradt
May 1, 2025

“For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.”
–Luke
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“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time….You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
–George Orwell
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Propaganda—the means used to manipulate people’s minds, from radio broadcasts to newspaper headlines—pursues the subjects of totalitarian rule through their dreams; so too do storm troopers, the means used to impose physical terror, in countless dreams that I will not discuss here since they are so obvious (yet many people dream them nevertheless). However, when a middle-aged housewife dreams that the tiled stove in her living room has become an agent of terror, clearly this is a different kind of terror. Her dream was:

A storm trooper was standing in front of the large, old-fashioned blue tiled stove in the corner of our living room, where we always sit and talk in the evening. He opened the stove door and it started to talk, in a shrill, penetrating voice [here again we have the penetrating voice recalling the loudspeaker voices of the previous day]. It said everything we’d said against the regime, every joke we’d told. God, I thought, what is it going to say next? All my little comments about Goebbels? But at the same time I realized that one sentence more or less wouldn’t make any difference—the fact was, they knew everything we’d thought and said to people we trusted. Just then I remembered that I had always laughed at the idea of the house being bugged; actually, I still don’t believe that it is. Even when the storm trooper tied my wrists—he used our dog’s leash—and was about to take me in, I thought he was just playing, and I even said in a loud voice: “You can’t be serious, this can’t be happening.” [This same disbelief in unbelievable reality—this almost schizophrenic split between the person experiencing something and the person looking on—was consistently observed in the concentration camps.]

It is important to realize that this dream of reveries by the Nazi fireside dates from 1933. What today are political facts, everyday realities, were not yet even described in novels: Orwell’s ever-present Big Brother did not yet exist, nor did the surveillance and recording devices from the second half of the twentieth century, used without any particular political purpose against a “defenseless society.” (The most recent refinement is miniaturizing these devices to the point where they can be installed inside a cocktail olive.)

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