Book about dreams of Shoah survivors: Communicating the unspeakable

Dreams have long been considered creative guides. Actions, interactions, objects or living beings that are dreamed about at night reveal something about one's own life - for example about the worries, fears and desires that are repressed during the day in order to function smoothly. Dealing with what you have dreamed can therefore radically change your own life. Anyone who writes down dreams or shares them with someone else begins to make the unconscious conscious. And this process is, according to the basic assumption of psychoanalysis and subsequent forms of therapy, an important step towards individual healing.

People who have experienced political violence, terror and torture usually dream differently. Their nightmares in particular often have comparable narrative structures, motifs and functions. This is exactly what Christiane Solte-Gresser, literary scholar and author of several books on the cultural history of dreams, dealt with in her new essay. She argues that dreaming and telling stories about it can be an important strategy in dealing with irreparable experiences. There is a “reparative potential” in the narrative communication of what has been dreamed to an empathetic counterpart who emotionally bears witness to what has been said. In this moment, the damaged self briefly overcomes its traumatic encapsulation.

In “Dream and Reparation,” Solte-Gresser primarily analyzes the dream narratives of Shoah survivors such as Imre Kertész, Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. Through their stories, they – and other survivors – would express experiences that they can hardly communicate in any other way. The dream narratives are therefore a valuable strategy for continuing life. Almost all narrators of Shoah dreams make a fundamental aporia their theme: the individual, urgently felt need to talk about the experience of National Socialist mass destruction - while at the same time being speechless about the crimes. Dreams offer them the opportunity to channel exactly that.

The experiences in the concentration and extermination camps are often not told in dreams in a coherent or linear way. Many dreams defy clear interpretation and, above all, express the senselessness experienced in a life in the camp. In the dreams that are told, names, voices, faces, gestures, touches and looks of the murdered are often preserved, which would otherwise be largely forgotten. Some dreams are dreams of being prevented from returning home from the camp and being refused food, or nightmares in which murdered people accuse the dreamers of their survival. For other survivors, dreaming in the camp provided a temporary escape from reality.

Christiane Solte-Gresser: "Dream and Reparation. Narrated Shoah Dreams". Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2026, 166 pages, 14 euros.

Should-Gresser describes the spectrum of narrative structures, motifs and functions in detail in her essay. She gives the original texts enough space. Unfortunately, how the survivors themselves thought or think today about telling their dreams is not an issue in “Dream and Reparation”; nor does the role of the reader or an audience as witnesses, which is still strongly emphasized in Should-Gresser's theorization of the reparative potential of dreams. The complex relationship between dreams and subsequent narratives about them, which is an important topic in psychoanalytic dream interpretation, also remains underexplored. Nevertheless, what the author brings out of the individual texts is impressive. It should be more incorporated into our fading knowledge of the Shoah.