John Cole: Good afternoon, and welcome to the Library of Congress.
I'm John Cole.
I am the Director of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress,
the small organization that exists to stimulate public interest
in books and reading and writers and in authors.
Last month, the Library of Congress celebrated the works and the life
of Henrik Ibsen through -- Henrik -- excuse me --
Ibsen through a symposium at the library which was held, I believe,
on the very date which was the centennial of his death, 1906.
Today we have a different kind of look at Ibsen.
It promises to be not only interesting
but to take a different angle on the playwright
and the Fuhrer, as it turns out.
I would like to acknowledge the help of the European Division,
represented by Georgette Dorn, who is the Acting Chief
and co-sponsoring today's event.   We also -- Grant Harris is here.
And Grant has helped a lot with both the previous Ibsen symposium
and serving as one of the Library of Congress' several subject experts
on Norway, really, and his help with this Ibsen celebration.
A book signing will follow this program, and we're pleased
that you are able to join us for it.   Our speaker is Steven Sage.
Steven has a Ph.D. from the University --
in history from the University of Hawaii.
He has written a book on Chinese history.
He spent time as the Chief Consul at the U.S. embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Excuse me.
Bulgaria. And he also, of course, has spent time
as a research fellow at the Holocaust Museum.
And he tells me that he is now a researcher there.
And I'm sure he's got another book up his sleeve.
It will be interesting to see if it's quite --
takes the angle that this interesting angle
that he's taken with this book.
Steven is going to, of course, describe the book for you.
And we will have the book signing.   I do like to hold up a copy
of a book whenever we have one of the book talks.
But I thought I would share with you something that I exchanged
with Steven in arranging this talk.
We had talked about trying, of course, to get a good crowd.
And he suggested I check with the Norwegian embassy.
And, in fact, we have someone representing the embassy here today,
my friend, Van Roghues   [ spelled phonetically ]
, who is the former National Librarian and now is
at the Norwegian embassy in a counselor kind of capacity.
But Steven said to me, and I was just a little worried saying, well,
now, where do you come out on this, and is this a good thing
to involve the Norwegians in, or do they know about this?
And he reassured me that, in fact, he'd been in touch
with the embassy and, in fact, with Norwegian press and with a number
of other people regarding this book and the topic.
And there was a little worry at the Library of Congress as well.
So in our exchange, Steven reassured me.
And I thought I would introduce him by way of what he wrote to me
about the book that you're about to hear about in this context.
He said, "John, I would like to reiterate that my book
in no way blames Ibsen himself
for the manner whereby racist German literary cultists
and Hitler appropriated and warped the playwright's works.
'Ibsen and Hitler,' the book, presents empirical findings.
And that's the tone of my presentation, with ample allowance
for Scandinavian sensitivities."   May I present Steven Sage.
Steven?   [ applause ]
If you can't see over, there you might want to move to this side,
see how -- well, you'll be able to see the screen all right.
Steven Sage: Ibsen is customarily called the "father of modern drama."
And until this year, marking the centennial of his passing,
no historian's ever suggested that his theatrical voice for reason,
for progress, for justice, and I might add for women's rights,
might somehow have influenced the most execrable murderess
and destructive tyrant of all time.
Indeed, Ibsen and Hitler, what juxtaposition;
what an odd coupling it might seem to be.
But lately, we see this story in the newspaper Ma Arish
[ spelled phonetically ]
in Tel Aviv, and we see even in the Norwegian daily "Dagbladet" in Oslo,
a cartoon in which Hitler is cast wearing the whiskers
of the mature Ibsen.   The cartoon here is by Arnen Nurst,
[ spelled phonetically ]
one of the leading political cartoonists in Norway.
Here is the "Dagbladet" story.
And there are other stories in other papers as well.
"Comment by a leading Norwegian professor, Hans Frederik Dahl
who was incidentally the biographer
of the man whose very name is synonymous
with treason,Vidkun Chrisling   [ spelled phonetically ]
. To Professor Dahl, the evidence of an actual line of influence
between Ibsen and the young Hitler is beyond doubt.
So what we're going to do today is look at some of that evidence.
More comment from Professor Robert Michael of the University
of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.
Robert Michael even saw the evidence in my book as instituting a
"golden key to understanding the greatest mystery
of the 20th century."
And believe me, I was just as astonished as anyone would be
when I stumbled over this evidence.
So should we be surprised, really, that a playwright was
of such influence to Hitler in doing what he did?
Not really.
Drama always meant quite a bit to Hitler.
Indeed, his wartime stenographer, Percy Schramm, who was incidentally,
also the post-war editor of Hitler's transcribed conversations.
Schramm noted that Hitler was never entirely free from the grip
of theater, and others along the way said pretty much the same sort
of thing.
His adjutant in the Nazi Party, Julius Schaub,
said that Hitler was extremely partial to the theater.
Schaub and Hitler's architect and Armaments Minister, Albert Speer,
said that theater always played a leading role in his life.
Why was this connection between Hitler and Ibsen never noted before?
I think because people have only given a cursory reading to Hitler.
Even during the Third Reich years, Hitler's famous work, "Mein Kampf,"
was more talisman than text.
It wasn't quoted in quite the same way as, say,
Chairman Mao's "Little Red Book" was so oft quoted in Germany.
But because it was not read closely anyway, certain strange features
in the work long went undiscovered.
And we're going to look at one of those features today.
A clue from "Mein Kampf," a book,
which I believe deserves a lot closer scrutiny.
Now here is a curious passage from "Mein Kampf," chapter three.
And I give you, on the left, the German text,
just three paragraphs here, and on the right,
the English text, for your comparison.
We'll look more closely at these three paragraphs
in their English version.
The theme here is the loan genius versus the tyrannical majority.
Now remember that when Hitler wrote "Mein Kampf,"
he was actually a convict.
He was imprisoned in Landsberg Prison
for having fomented the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.
And he spent a good part of the year 1924 as a prisoner having
to justify his actions of the year before.
And he's coming on here in this passage as the lone voice for truth,
the solitary genius who has the key to all history
and is being ignored by the howling mob.
He is striking out here against the mob, against parliamentary rule
and counter posing himself in the guise of the champion
of the aristocratic principal of nature.
He goes on in the next paragraph to slam newspapers, which, of course,
to Hitler has to be the Jewish-controlled press.
He is, again, exalting independent thought and hitting the majority.
And then we look at the last paragraph in which the champions
of mediocrity are slammed as leather merchants.
And he takes a swipe also at the village mayor.
Now there's nothing in the "Mein Kampf" context
that admits these metaphors easily.   They're bizarre.
You're left dangling if you are giving the text a close reading.
Why leather merchants?   And why the village mayor?
These are not idiomatic locutions in German.
They are simply inexplicable in this context.
And being inexplicable in this context, they must, per force,
have some sort of prompt source.   What is the source?
Elementary.
Not so elementary; took a lot of work to find it.
The source is Ibsen's play, "Ein Volksfeind," in the German;
"An Enemy of the People" in its English translation.
Now what is the play "An Enemy of the People" about?
It's about what happens in a spa town set somewhere, someplace,
a town that makes its livelihood by hosting guests
who are there for the healing waters.
But the doctor in charge of the purity of those waters,
the physician, Dr. Thomas Stockmann has made an alarming discovery.
He's found that there are noxious, disease-causing germs
in the supposedly salubrious waters of the town spa.
And he goes about trying to do something to close down the spa
until the noxious germs can be eradicated.
However, in doing so, he's trodding on vested economic interests.
To spread the alarm means to scare the public away from the town.
The hotels will no longer be filled.
The restaurants will no longer have guests, so on and so forth.
He's going to hit the economy of the town.
He calls a town meeting to discuss in the climatic Act IV of the play.
And he's hooted down.
Not only hooted down, he's abandoned by his brother
who happens to be the town mayor.
And he is then subjected to being condemned by the town assembly as,
quote, unquote, "an enemy of the people."
So let's look at some passages from Act IV of the play.
And what I've done here is to string together some paragraphs
from about a five-page sequence of the play.
You'll note that there are some ellipses in the quotes.
And I have given you a picture here, also, of the British actor,
Ian McClellan, who is now also starring in "Da Vinci Code."
This was a British stage production of the play in 1997.
And Dr. Stockmann is holding in his hand the germ-infested water,
a sample of it, in his bottle.
Let's look at this quote more carefully,
lining it up against the "Mein Kampf" quotation.
"We have, again, the aristocrats versus the mob.
We have the freethinker who is an exponent of natural science.
We have newspapers being slammed for spreading lies.
We have the so-called respectable mayor taken to task.
And we have the tanneries representing leather merchants, the
[ German ]   leather merchants."
So we've lined up a lot of key words within the shared context.
The overall theme matches up.   Key words match up.
And we've accounted in particular for that odd allusion
to the village mayor, both in Stockmann's words and in Hitler's,
as well as to the bizarre allusion to tanneries or specifically
in Hitler's locution, to leather merchants.
Now did Hitler plagiarize?
Well since "Mein Kampf" was a published work put
on sale, yeah, he plagiarized.
But for historical significance, we're going beyond this idea
of a mere intellectual theft,
and we're looking more deeply what it means to history.
It goes beyond plagiarizing.
Hitler did not recite the Ibsen lines verbatim.
Instead, he made the text part of his own adopted lexicon,
internalizing its message so that, in effect, he played the role
of Dr. Stockmann in "Mein Kampf."   And it goes beyond "Mein Kampf."
That's the point.
In the years following "Mein Kampf," in fact,
after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, some hidden hand, somehow,
favored this play in productions on the German stage.
In fact, of all Ibsen plays,
it was the second most often performed in Nazi Germany.
This is the actor Oigen Klipfur   [ spelled phonetically ]
playing the impassioned Dr. Stockmann
in the climatic scene from Act IV of the play.
Not only was it performed on stage, but there was a film production also
in 1937 with the pro-Nazi film star Heinrich George starring
as Dr. Stockmann.   This was a sound film,
[ German ]
film. Now practical consequences ensue.
We are not merely talking about a literary curiosity here.
The practical consequences hinge on the message of the play at the time.
It was about germs, at least that's the template,
the background for the plot.
And in Hitler's locution, not in Ibsen's --
we should say Ibsen was certainly not an anti-Semite --
but in Hitler's particular locution, the germs equal the Jews,
and the Jews equal germs.   No exceptions.
Indeed, in Hitler's daily lexicon, Jews and germs or bacilli, microbes,
viruses, what have you in the way of synonyms,
they are coupled routinely almost like "wine dock" and "sea"
or "rosy fingered" and "dawn" in Homer.
The germs equal the Jews.
And this theme of Hitler's carries on then
into the actual wartime period.
Once again, we have a source of Hitler's off-the-cuff remarks.
The source is called, in German, the "Tischgesprach"
[ spelled phonetically ]   , which translates as "table talk."
It was a source which appeared in print first in 1953.
And it is the record of Hitler's offhand conversations, monologues,
really, at table during this period of the war when things were
at first looking pretty good for Nazi arms.
And Hitler thought that his informal comments at table ought
to be preserved for history, and they were.
On July 10th 1941, we have this from the stenographer, transcribed,
"I feel like Robert Koch in politics.
He discovered the bacilli
and pointed many things in a new direction.
I discovered the Jews and the bacillus and their fermenting agent
of social decomposition," Hitler as Robert Koch.
On 17th July 1941, "When even one state
for any reason whatsoever tolerated one single Jewish family
in its midst, this would constitute a source
of bacilli touching off a new infection."
Again, the Jews as germs.
It goes on, February 22nd 1942, "The discovery of the Jewish virus is one
of the greatest revolutions that have taken place in the world.
The battle in which we are engaged today is the same sort
as the battle waged during the last century by Pasteur and Koch.
How many diseases have their origin in the Jewish virus?
We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jews."
Now this man was, in effect, at that moment, the, if you will,
surgeon general of Europe.   He's going after germs.
He's also going after, "liars"" and establishing truth.
Remember that Dr. Stockmann role.
We have this quote, once again, from "Tischgesprach," "Table Talk,"
February the 8th 1942, "I am convinced
in 10 years things will look different because we haven't
yet reached the fundamental solution.
If one thinks it's really essential to build a human society on a basis
of untruth, then such a society is unworthy to exist.
If one takes truth as the necessary firmament,
then the conscience is tasked to intervene on behalf of truth
and to exterminate untruth."
This bears a closer look, this quotation.
What, again, is the source?   Does he have a prompt source?
And the source, again, elementary, we are back to Act IV
of "Ein Volksfeind," "An Enemy of the People."
Let's line up Dr. Stockmann's words against Hitler's.
We have some of the same German keywords repeated:
[ German ]
. And it's very much in the same context of the message.
They're not really random appearances of the key words.
They're saying pretty much the same thing.
Both Stockmann and Hitler are attacking a society based on lies.
Both are convinced in the justice of a radical solution.
To both speakers, extermination offers the only sure answer.
And again, the same German keywords appear in both passages.
Dr. Stockmann as Hitler, Dr. Hitler as Stockmann.
Again, the Fuhrer has resumed here from where he left off
in "Mein Kampf" 18 years before, actually from about a page away
from what we have on the record in "Mein Kampf."
Or is he resuming, or has he not been playing the Dr. Stockmann role
all along whenever he stated that Jews equal germs?
So, on empirical grounds, I will state that these appearances
of like texts are not due to mere coincidence.
I will venture that it is now certain that Hitler was well versed
in Ibsen's drama, "An Enemy of the People."
And there are other circumstantial bits of evidence that confirm this.
Hitler warped the play's message
to his own needs while regurgitating its lines as paraphrase.
His fixation on this play was long abiding.
There are instances before "Mein Kampf," and as we see now,
it goes all the way to 1942 -- over 18 years.
Hitler personally identified with the lead character, Dr. Stockmann,
sometimes Koch and Pasteur are stand-ins because even the Fuhrer
of the German Reich doesn't say to his associates, hey, you know,
I'm identifying with a character for the stage.
And what I'm doing is really emulation of a play.
No, even the Fuhrer doesn't say that.
His fixation on "An Enemy of the People" furthermore,
historically speaking, bears directly on his plans
for the "final solution."
Beyond "An Enemy of the People," Hitler paraphrased lines
from two other Ibsen plays.
And these paraphrases also turn up over a decade-long period
on the extent stenographic record of what he said, demonstrating, again,
that he had taken these scripts to heart.
Meanwhile, Hitler also took practical real world initiatives
in like sequence, matching plot episodes from these two other plays,
these being "The Master Builder" and "Emperor and Galilean."
And we'll have a closer look now at the play "Emperor and Galilean."
"Emperor and Galilean" is a play which Ibsen wrote, incidentally at,
of all places, Berchtesgaden, which later became, as we know,
Hitler's own favored mountain retreat.
It is about -- the play is about the fourth century Roman ruler,
Julian the Apostate who had sought to replace Christianity
with a Neopagan, "Third Reich," das Drittes Reich
in the German translation of Ibsen's play.
Now, Julian the Apostate in the fourth century didn't go
about talking about a third Reich.
No. That is an Ibsen interpolation into the record on Julian.
German literary cultists started to make a cult around this play
in the years just following Ibsen's death in 1906.
Such books as "Ibsen As Prophet" began appearing.
And they appear from around 1908 or so.
1908 was the year that Hitler read Ibsen's plays,
according to his roommate.
These cult books appear from 1908 on into the early 1920s.
Not only do they extol Ibsen as a "prophet,"
but the cult spawned a pro-Nazi variant
in which some writers are even pointing to Hitler
as the one anointed to bring about the message
of Ibsen's prophetic play about Julian the Apostate.
And in the "Tischgesprach," the "Table Talk," for 1941, 1942,
we have three mentions by Hitler of Julian the Apostate
in which he is clearly identifying himself with the Julian character.
The question then is what is Hitler's source for Julian.
And again, through close enough paraphrases, enough instances
of them, some half a dozen or so, I have determined that his source
for Julian can be none other than Ibsen's play.
But it goes, again, beyond paraphrase,
and it goes beyond mere literary curiosity.
There are sequential Hitlerian moves following Julian's moves
in the Ibsen play, as opposed to Julian's moves
on the historical record or in other literary sources.
And these sequential moves by Hitler, having counterparts
in Ibsen's play include his youthful statement of apostasy
from Christian doctrine, calling it, "blindness," his adoption
of Third Reich as a Nazi cachet, his relationship, his,
Hitler's relationship with his niece, Geli Raubal,
her violent death in 1931 and the arrangements
for her burial in Vienna.
The whole sequence matches up pretty closely with Julian's relationship
with Princess Helena, his consort, in the play, her death
and what it portends from the play
and then her burial in a place called Vien.
Now, in actual history, so far as we know from contemporary sources,
she was not buried in Vien or Vienna.
She was buried in Rome.   Ibsen, for reasons we don't know,
changed the venue of her burial place.
And Hitler, in 1931, after the shooting death of his niece,
had her buried in Vienna.
Very strange, because she died in Hitler's flat in Munich.
Hitler's unsuccessful run for the German presidency
in 1932 matches Julian's bid
for power following the death of Princess Helena.
The sequence of like moves or analogous moves continues
after Hitler rose to rule in Germany.
As German chancellor, Hitler promised first a tolerance
to the German churches, signing a concordat with Rome
and promising tolerance also to the Protestant churches.
And once the ink was on the paper for these agreements,
he began almost immediately to go back on his word.
Again, it matches Julian's relationship
to the church in the play.
Hitler's ceremonial book burning in spring 1933, there's a book burning
in the play at the same juncture.   Hitler doesn't get out of sequence.
There is a curious mishap during the ritual dedication of an art museum
in Munich in October 1933.
Hitler is affixing the plaque to the cornerstone
of the House of German Art.   And what happens?
The ceremonial silver hammer for that dedication purpose breaks.
The handle falls off from the head,
and Hitler is left holding the handle of this hammer.
Excuse me, but German metal craftsmanship is better than that.
What's the counterpart in the Ibsen play?
Ibsen has Julian practicing in a tournament.
He's holding a shield when suddenly the shield falls off
from the handle.
Now, Hitler couldn't make these charades exactly.
Hitler is not going to go about brandishing a sword and a shield.
But in each instance, the breakage of the object is seen
by those around as a bad omen.
And in each instance, there is a speech then by the guy
who is left holding the handle, Julian and then Hitler,
to the effect that no, it's not really a bad omen,
it presages good and not evil.
And the two incidents do seem to match up in this way.
Again, they occur in the same sequence of analogous incidents.
Hitler went on to rebuild Germany's military fortifications along the
Western borders.
What did he call these fortifications
at first in 1938, 1939?
The initial word for them in Hitler's orders to the
[ German ]
to get the project going was the limes.
He's calling them by a Roman name for fortifications.
Why? In fact, in Roman times,
the fortification line along the Rhine was built
to keep the Germans out.
Hitler's reversed this, but he's still adopting Roman terminology.
Going on to analogous incidents.
Julian tries to rebuild the temple at Jerusalem.
It fails, and the temple is destroyed in fire and brimstone.
Hitler one-ups Julian on that one.
He doesn't try to ally with the Jews and rebuild their temple.
No. He's going to correct Julian and go straight to the destruction
of synagogues on Kristallnacht,
the Night of Broken Glass in November 1938.
Again, the analogy occurs in the same sequence,
and the sequence continues in the course of the Second World War.
Most notably, very notably, Hitler's Non-Aggression Pact with Stalin
in 1939 recalls Julian's peace
with the Persian Empire followed almost immediately
by a betrayal of that pact.
In Hitler's case, 1941, shadowing Julian's breach
of his peace with Persia.
Now, on the historical record for Hitler, we know that as early
as spring 1940, he's talking about betraying his peace pact
with Stalin, but circumstances forced him
to postpone that betrayal.
He's on record, though, as having the intention as soon
as the Non-Aggression Pact
with Stalin was finalized in August of '39.
Hitler's draft plan to invade Russia, this is Directive No.
21 of December 1940.
The initial draft plan includes a heavy concentration of armor
on the central portion of the front followed
by a swerve of that armor northward.   The generals in the
[ German ]   wouldn't have any part of it.
They're wondering what's gotten into the Fuhrer's head.
Why swerve the armor toward the north
when you can make a clear shot and capture Moscow?
The analogy we have in the Ibsen version of Julian's military actions
against Persia, an attack on the Persian capital at
[ German ]
with then an avoidance of the capture of the Persian capital
and instead a swing of the Army northward.
And last, in this sequence of analogous events, Hitler's order
to exterminate European Jews in general, under the pretext
that they were, "partisans."   This is known from a notation
in Himmler's personal notebook for December 1941.
And the analogous lines occur in Part II of the Ibsen play
about Julian in which Julian refers to the Christians as,
"a hostile army in the rear."
Throughout Hitler's analogy to the Ibsen play, throughout,
we have the substitution of Jews for Christians.
And it's in keeping with Hitler's stated goal.
And he states this very clearly in the "Table Talk"
that the annihilation of European "Jewery" was but a first step
in the establishment of a pagan state
which would do away with Christianity.
So, to conclude, look at the complete set of evidence,
the paraphrased words, the analogous deeds
and the circumstantial evidence connecting Hitler to a cult of Ibsen
as prophet and the anointed one to carry out the message
of these so-called prophetic plays.
Is Ibsen the Rosetta Stone for understanding Hitler?
For the complete evidence, you are invited, of course,
to have a look at "Ibsen and Hitler."
[ applause ]   [ end of transcript ]