I spend a lot of time thinking about Charlotte Beradt. She was a Jewish communist, a collector and translator, but little is known of her. During the 1930s in Berlin for reasons we still don’t know entirely, she collected dreams of the persecuted. Up to the Nazi rise to power she had been a journalist too, and unlike many Jewish communists she and her husband Martin remained in Germany during the Nazi years in order for him to care for his mother (who died in 1939.) After Martin’s mothers death they fled to New York, and Martin died a few years later. Charlotte spent the rest of her life making a living as a hairdresser, and she became a close associate of Hannah Arendt, translating some of her work written in English into German. Some of the dreams in Beradt’s collection were published in a volume in the late 1960s, although Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism casts a dark shadow over the work. The dreams, more often than not, become mere exemplars of theoretical propositions. yet the book was important enough to inspire short essays by Reinhard Koselleck and Bruno Bettelheim (in the German and English editions respectively.) In the 1970s she returned to an interest in early 20th century communists, publishing a biography of Paul Levi, and an edition of Rosa Luxemburg’s prison letters. For a long time I have wanted to track down Beradt’s collection, but I yet to be successful. Part of the reason is that she was quiet about her own work. Her husband, Martin, had been an author of novels and short stories, and under the Nazis his books had been outlawed and burnt. She spent the greater part of the post-war period trying to bring them back into publication, and to find an archival home for them alongside newspaper columns and feuilletons. After her death in 1986, papers from her were deposited at Fairleigh Dickinson University but the librarians there told me that at some point in the 1990s they were transferred to the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. They become the “Martin Beradt collection” These papers have now been digitised but their focus is mainly on Martin alone and Charlotte’s attempts to get his work republished. Martin’s papers are interesting enough – they show correspondences with figures ranging from Max Brod to Thomas Mann to Martin Buber, but they don’t help with the collection of dreams. Meanwhile the Deutsches Literatur Archiv in Marbach has 6 boxes of Charlotte’s material. I don’t know what is there or whether the collection of dreams are still to be unearthed. I also don’t know the history of custodianship, or how these materials ended up back in Germany, but I would love to go and find out. Perhaps when I am sleeping better again and I am feeling less wraith-like I will go to try to find out. I cannot imagine that the papers were disposed of, and it is clear that she must have held and kept them between the 1930s and the 1960s, by which time she must have recognised them as a significant and unique collection. But then perhaps she was busy living her life, labouring away as a hairdresser, and they disappeared along the way as dreams so often do.
