History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake (2025)
for high voice with effects, keyboard and playback
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake juxtaposes real dreams from Nazi Germany, as transcribed by Charlotte Beradt, with the imagined nightmare of the 1975 nazisploitation film Ilsa - She-Wolf of the SS. In the movie, Ilsa, the busty comandante of an imaginary ‘medical camp’, castrates any man who fails to please her inextinguishable desire.
Ilsa is a reactionary male fantasy, and in a perverted – yet somewhat funny – way displaying male anxieties about the emancipated woman. The film says more about the backlash to the womens movement of the 1970s than about real Nazism – Ilsa is the threatening woman, the castrating female emancipation – she is literally the ‘feminazi’. Ilsa is the woman controlled by her desire, which is ultimately inferior to male desire, as is shown when copulating with the ever-hard American named Wolf, who literally f–s her to death. She is, in Klaus Theweleit's words, the ‘erotic woman, nature turned upside down’, and in this respect a nightmare the Nazis could have had – except that she herself is portrayed as a Nazi.
The aim of my admittedly provocative juxtaposition of Ilsa with real dreams of non-persecuted women from Nazi Germany is not to level real atrocities with absurd fake ones, nor to support reactionary stances.
Rather, I am constructing a dialogue between a fake male nightmare with real female dreams from a living nightmare. To investigate how the erotic, desire and power interact, and how imaginations of fascism can be used to harness ideologies, in good and bad ways. With the title and last sentence of the piece, taken from a passage in Joyce’s Ulysses, in which anti-semitism is discussed, I wish to frame the piece in a broader context of historicity, and to hint at the possibility of nightmares returning once again from the realm of imagination.
Charlotte Beradt, „Das Dritte Reich des Traums", 1994 ©Suhrkamp Verlag AG, Berlin.
first performed by Sebastian Berweck and me at Radialsystem Berlin, Ultraschall, 17th January 2026
From critic Jan Brachmann‘s review in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 19th January 2026:
[…] Monrad Møller’s work now adds a female perspective to what Klaus Theweleit described in his book 'Male Fantasies'. The pop sounds that Sebastian Berweck conjures up on the keyboard, combined with Monrad Møller, interspersed with non-verbal sounds of female pleasure, describe sexual fascination with National Socialism without succumbing to it. That is the achievement of art. In this case, it takes Brecht’s didactic verse “The womb is still fertile from which it crawled” and transforms the metaphorical back into the physical.
This is about an archaeology of collective sexuality and a musical psychoanalysis of our coming to terms with the past. “I dream, even though it is forbidden to dream,” sings Monrad Møller, as if in a chorus of politically incorrect lust. […] Yet the ‘political queerness’ that Monrad Møller analyses in his play takes on a whole new dimension: it also addresses the way in which bans heighten political appeal. The more National Socialism is demonised as an aesthetic and political phenomenon in documentaries and narratives, the more its fascination is locked away and comparisons of other phenomena with it are penalised, the greater its appeal becomes. Many a political career has succumbed to the intellectual thrill of the Nazi comparison. And even today we are witnessing how the firewall only makes the AfD sexier, and how every call for a ban from the other parties causes the poll and election results for their opponent to skyrocket, effectively boosting them in the polls. In this respect, Monrad Møller’s “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” is one of the most politically explosive works of art of our time. […]
Dreamer:
I am at a movie theater, a very large and very dark theater. I’m afraid – actually wasn't
supposed to be here – only party members are allowed to go to the movies. Hitler comes in, and
I get even more frightened. But he not only lets me stay – he even sits down next to me and
puts his arm around me.
Ilsa:
When victory comes, we shall have children.
They will be beautiful… strong…
Dreamer:
I no longer dream about anything but rectangles, triangles, and octagons, […] because it’s
forbidden to dream.