Distinguished Lecture – Mortenson Center for International Library Programs

35th Annual Mortenson Distinguished Lecture | 4 Sept 2025

“The THIRD REICH OF DREAMS: Hallucinations, Literary Imagination, and (Un)conscious Archives,” by Amanda Rubin, Documentary Filmmaker and Journalist

In Memory of Founding Mortenson Center Director Marianna Tax Choldin

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In 1991 Marianna Tax Choldin (1942-2023) became the founding director of the Mortenson Center for International Library Programs (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library), which she led until her retirement at the end of 2002, and was bestowed the title of Mortenson Distinguished Professor Emerita. As director, she developed programs that brought librarians from all over the world to Urbana-Champaign, some for short courses and some for extended periods of study. At the time of her retirement, nearly 600 Mortenson Associates from 76 countries had spent time on the campus. Under Professor Choldin’s direction, the Center initiated cooperative programs with libraries, library associations, universities, and other organizations in Russia, Central America, Haiti, Georgia, and South Africa.

Professor Choldin traveled all over the world to work with librarians, promoting improved library services, new technologies, and especially freedom of information. From 1997 to 2000 she chaired the multifaceted library program of the Soros Foundation, which has distributed millions of dollars to libraries and librarians in more than 30 countries.

Educated at the University of Chicago, Professor Choldin received her bachelor’s degree with Phi Beta Kappa in 1962 and her doctorate in 1979. She was on the faculty of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) from 1969 through 2002. She was an adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and served as director of the Russian and East European Center and head of the Slavic and East European Library.

In her own research Professor Choldin studied censorship in Russia, the Soviet Union, and the post-Communist world. The author of numerous articles and books, she is best known for A Fence Around the Empire: Russian Censorship of Western Ideas Under the Tsars and The Red Pencil: Artists, Scholars, and Censors in the USSR (co-edited with Maurice Friedberg). Her last book, Garden of Broken Statues: Exploring Censorship in Russia (Academic Studies Press) was published in 2016. A Russian-language edition was scheduled for publication in Moscow in 2017 (Rudomino Book Center).

In 1995 she was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. In 2000 the government of Russia awarded her the Pushkin Gold Medal for contributions to culture. In 2001 she was the first recipient of the University of Illinois’ Distinguished Faculty Award for International Achievement. In 2005 the American Library Association’s International Relations Committee gave her the John Ames Humphry/OCLC/Forest Press Award for significant contributions to international librarianship. From 2004 through 2010 she was founding president of the Rudomino Library Council USA, an organization supporting projects that promoted tolerance in Russia. In 2011 Professor Choldin received a public service award from the University of Chicago, and the Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award from the School of Information Sciences (formerly, Graduate School of Library and Information Science) at UIUC. She was featured in 150 for 150 website Celebrating the Accomplishments of Women at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Learn more:

University of Illinois Librarian Selected as Recipient of Russia’s Most Prestigious Cultural Award. (2001). Slavic & East European Information Resources, 2(1), 23–25. https://doi.org/10.1300/J167v02n01_04
Miller, L. H. (2023). Marianna Tax Choldin. Slavic Review, 82(4), 1131–1134. doi:10.1017/slr.2024.16
Marianna Tax Choldin Interview (video)
“Walls and Windows, Islands and Bridges: Libraries Along the Road to Civil Society.” Marianna Tax Choldin delivered the 12th Annual Mortenson Distinguished Lecture on October 21, 2002. <Text | PDF>

Thursday, 4 September 2025 | 3:30-5:00 pm CT Lecture :: 5:00-5:45 pm CT Reception and Book Signing in person to follow (Check for local time here: https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/)

HYBRID: In person (School of Information Sciences building, Room 126, 501 E. Daniel St., Champaign) AND online

Related Events:

Dreams as Inspiration, Insights, Foreshadowing and Evidence: A Panel Discussion Through the Lens of “The Third Reich of Dreams”
September 2, 2025; 4:00-5:15pm | Location: School of Information Sciences, 614 E. Daniel St., Champaign, Room 4045. No registration needed.

moderated by Steve Witt, Director, Center for Global Studies and Head of the International and Area Studies Library, in conversation with

Amanda Rubin, Documentary Filmmaker and Journalist

Brett Ashley Kaplan, Director of Holocaust Genocide and Memory Studies, Professor

Melita M. Garza, Associate Professor and Tom and June Netzel Sleeman Scholar in Business Journalism

Crafting Compelling Stories: A Hands-On Visual Storytelling Workshop, facilitated by Amanda Rubin
September 3, 2025; 9-4 (Lunch on your own) | Location: Main Library, Room 314 (1408 W. Gregory Dr., Urbana) | Capacity: 24

At this visual storytelling workshop, Amanda Rubin, documentary filmmaker, journalist and independent scholar, will introduce students, academics and community members to visual storytelling skills and methods, including storyboarding, mood boarding, and writing scripts, as well as working with and adapting archival materials. She will lead the workshop by discussing the documentary she’s making on Charlotte Beradt, author
of The Third Reich of Dreams (2025) to inspire participants to communicate their research, professional, and creative interests through powerful visual narratives.

CHAI Seniors Luncheon, featuring Amanda Rubin
Thursday, September 4, 2025; 12-1pm | Location: Sinai Temple, 3104 Windsor Rd., Champaign. Coordinated by the Champaign-Urbana Jewish Foundation. Read more <here>.

ABSTRACT

Berlin, 1933. Shortly after Hitler is elected Chancellor, Journalist Charlotte Beradt (1906-1968) begins to experience vivid, disturbing nightmares. Realising she’s not alone, she embarks on a quiet mission to record the dream life of her Jewish and non-Jewish friends, colleagues, and neighbours in Berlin. She compiles an extraordinary document of the slow colonization of the unconscious as the Third Reich’s persecutions and propaganda seep into the last refuge of the private self. The resulting book: The Third Reich of Dreams.

Amanda Rubin, documentary filmmaker and journalist, has brought this long-overlooked classic back to print in a newly-translated English edition (Princeton Press, 2025). Her Mortenson Distinguished Lecture will share Beradt’s incredible untold story and legacy of courage as a woman, journalist, and refugee. The lecture will focus on the power of the irrepressible imagination and the potent symbolism of books, writing and archiving as “witnesses to history”.

Against the pre-war European backdrop of book-burnings and book-bannings by university students, Beradt’s dangerous mission of compiling dreams soon evolves into a methodical, six-year project to collect ‘evidence’, bearing witness to the tormented reality of an authoritarian regime. In dreams as well as in life, walls “dissolve,” suspicion becomes “universal fact,” loudspeakers blare commands into bedrooms, and thought-detecting machines patrol public spaces—more than a decade before Orwell imagined such horrors in his dystopian novel, 1984.

Writing in code and hiding the notes in the bindings of books in her library, Beradt sends these secret ‘diaries of the night’ in innocuous-seeming letters, to friends abroad for safe-keeping. It was not until the 1960s, while an emigree in New York, that Beradt, a close friend of Philosopher Hannah Arendt, revisited the dream diaries and published The Third Reich of Dreams. Beradt explores common symbols, themes, and even warnings that had appeared in this unique archive of inner life under tyranny. Out of print for over 40 years, it was whilst researching a documentary that Filmmaker Amanda Rubin discovered and acquired the ‘lost’ English language rights.

As our own era confronts rising authoritarianism and deepening polarisation, dreams illuminate the subtle psychological mechanisms of control to reveal how propaganda distorts reality, how we unconsciously conform, and what happens when the distinctions between fact and fiction begin to dissolve.

Reviews of THE THIRD REICH OF DREAMS

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Reviews of THE THIRD REICH OF DREAMS (Princeton University Press, 2025) by Charlotte Beradt | Translated by Damion Searls | Preface by Dunya Mikhail

“…a unique archive of inner life under tyranny…, “The Third Reich of Dreams” [in] a new English edition, translated with crisp clarity by Damion Searls, revives this long-overlooked classic. First published in Germany in 1966, Beradt’s book is at once a nocturnal oral history, a collection of parables worthy of Kafka and a revelatory account of despotism internalized … the least we can do is read this singular document with our eyes wide open.” — Benjamin Ballint, The Wall Street Journal

“… the kind of book that haunts your dreams. Essential reading for anyone who has known what it is like to live within a totalitarian state—or is worried they’re about to find out.” — Zadie Smith, New York Review of Books

“Dreams are perfect for registering nascent authoritarianism and the ways its repressions actually unfold: not as a single announcement or explosive act but as a steady, growing rumble while the ground beneath your feet begins to shift.” — Gal Beckerman, The Atlantic

“Newly translated, the remarkable collection—which is unique in the canon of Holocaust literature—may now find more readers. It arrives at a time when people are more interested in the connection between sleep and well-being than ever before.” — The Economist

“The 40 best books published so far this year” — The Economist

BIOGRAPHY

A documentary filmmaker, journalist and independent scholar, Amanda Rubin works at the intersection of cultural history, music, the arts, and science. Her works have been featured on BBC, Channel 4, The History Channel, and Discovery+, among other notable channels. Her relevant recent work includes 21st Century Mythologies (BBC) which unpacks the 1957 book Mythologies, by French philosopher Roland Barthes, laying bare the mythmaking at the heart of consumer culture. It was while researching a film about journalist Charlotte Beradt and her unique dream anthology The Third Reich of Dreams that Amanda discovered the lost English language rights to the book. She was the force behind its republication in English in April 2025 with Princeton University Press to excellent reviews. She is currently also making a radio documentary for BBC Radio 4 about the dream collection and the role of psychotherapy under the Nazis. She lives and works in London. Read more here.

CO-SPONSORS: Champaign Urbana Jewish Federation | Mortenson Center for International Library Programs | The Program in Jewish Culture & Society | School of Information Sciences | UNESCO Center for Global Citizenship | University of Illinois Library Urbana-Champaign

SUPPORTERS: Center for Global Studies | European Union Center | The Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies

International Day of Peace 2025 Theme: Act Now for a Peaceful World

The Lecture celebrates Libraries for Peace (L4P) Day, in observation of International Day of Peace with the world community. The theme for the International Day of Peace in 2025 is “Act Now for a Peaceful World”.

Join the UN on September 21st and every day to listen, learn, understand and speak to advance peace. See the Actions for a Peaceful World.

A Welcoming Week event

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Information forthcoming