Scripting Silence: Animals Political and Unpolitical in Charlotte Beradt’s Dreamscape
Sep 22, 2026 | 5pm ET
Lecture at UC Berkeley (201 Philosophy Hall, UC Berkeley) | Speaker: Ariel Tang (Stanford University)
This talk features the implicit dialogue between the German-Jewish journalist Charlotte Beradt (1907-1986) and her fellow émigré, Hannah Arendt, regarding the boundaries between humans and animals, as well as the ethical limits of anthropocentrism during political crises. Beradt’s Third Reich of Dreams, a catalogue of dreams compiled between 1933 and 1939 on the basis of dreams retold by more than fifty Germans living under totalitarian rule, prompts her readers to re-evaluate the unique traits of physiological activities such as dreaming—as opposed to discursive reasoning—in safeguarding the humane promise of politics. While conventional pictures of human nature often fall prey to naturalistic or essentialist tendencies, the vital dialogue between Beradt and Arendt helps to resuscitate the unmistakable normative value of anthropological evidence, the substance of which often escapes the immediate capture of language and yet preserves the hope for political renewal lost in effable experience.
If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact ies@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.
Contact Info: ies@berkeley.edu
Access Coordinator: Institute of European Studies, ies@berkeley.edu, 510-642-4555
About the speaker
Ariel Tang is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. Her research focuses on Enlightenment political thought and its legacies, with special attention to questions related to knowledge institutions, education, and the interactions between culture and nature. Her current book manuscript traces an entangled history of the idea of Bildung and the rise of the modern research university. She received her bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Barnard College, Columbia University, and her PhD in Political Science from Yale University.