Mireille Dushaw
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
So what have you been doing?
In between working on my next novel, I've found a really fascinating book in Sydney Uni Library.
I found it a little while ago and it's a rare copy of a book that's no longer in print about the dreams of Germans under the Third Reich.
And so my little side project is that I'm determined to see it in reprint in English because it is in print in other languages.
It was an interesting project because it was done by a Jewish journalist called Charlotte Barat, who later became, was a friend of Hannah Arendt and lived in New York once she fled Germany.
But because she was Jewish, she was sort of limited in the scope of her project.
She couldn't obviously speak to people who were
too sympathetic or too pro the regime.
And so she spoke to people in her orbit, I guess.
She lived in Charlottenburg, which is a sort of assimilated Jewish middle-class suburb in Berlin.
And she interviewed people like her hairdresser, doctors, neighbours, people she came in contact with.
And the dreams are astonishing because they almost...
predict what is later to come because she's doing these interviews in the early 30s so things have not yet reached their horrific peak under Nazism and yet people are dreaming of piles of bodies and things being incinerated and it's quite astonishing what she finds in these dreams and I guess part of her project is to show the way that that kind of regime infiltrates the inner life
and the impact it has on people's psychological selves.