Steven F. Sage. Ibsen and Hitler: The Playwright, the Plagiarist, and the Plot for the Third Reich. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006. Print.

Let me tell you how I ended up reading this book. Goddard in his Meaning of Shakespeare mentions that Ibsen thought his best play was Emperor and Galilean. Now, I am no Ibsen expert, but I have taken a couple of modern drama courses and have read a few of his plays. Even some I have not read, I have read about. But this was one I had never heard of, yet Ibsen thought it was his best?

The title of that work did resonate, though. It sounded like it was probably about the Emperor Julian the Apostate (A.D. 361-363). Julian had become Emperor of the Roman Empire after a series of Christian emperors and had attempted to make the official religion of the Empire the old pagan Roman polytheistic one. (Christianity would not become the state religion of the Empire until 380 under Theodosius). When Julian died his last words were reported by some to be “You have conquered, Galilean.” We know that in his own writings, Julian referred to Jesus as the Galilean.

I turned to that source of all knowledge, Wikipedia, which says that, indeed, Emperor and Galilean is a two-play cycle about the accession, rule, and death of Julian the Apostate. It was not translated into English until 1963—a condensed version at that. Unlike Ibsen’s recognized great works like A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck, or Enemy of the People, it was never produced at all on stage in English till 2010, about 140 years after it was written. Ibsen may have liked it, but it did not seem that too many other people, certainly not English speakers, cared at all about it.

One thing caught my attention. Ibsen presents Julian fairly sympathetically. His intent in part is to make a connection with the rising romantic attraction to some aspects of the pagan religions (think of Wagner or Swinburne) in reaction to Christianity in the culture of the nineteenth century. The way Ibsen tells it, Julian sees his attempt to revive the Roman religion as an attempt to establish the Third Empire. He died in battle and was unsuccessful, but one of his court magicians “prophesies” that there will be a Third Empire some day. Reich is the German word for empire. The Third Reich? Re-establishment of paganism at the expense of monotheism? That seemed too weird to be entirely coincidental.

Steven Sage apparently was wondering the same thing. That is where Ibsen and Hitler comes in. The book begins slowly and carefully. The first few chapters seem almost apologetic. At one point I said to myself, “Dr. Sage doth protest too much methinks.” But once the book gets going, it is fascinating. The author at one point self-consciously realizes that a book about Hitler’s motives is not going to be too popular among academics. But Dr. Sage had been a fellow at the Holocaust Museum. If anyone could give a hearing to this thesis, he would be the person.

He begins to make his case. A significant chapter in Hitler’s Mein Kampf plagiarizes Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. Mainly, the heroic and scientific doctor who is the main character of the play is scorned by the masses because he is trying to disinfect the public baths from bacteria which Pasteur has very recently connected with disease. Not only would Hitler adopt the “scientific” social outlook of the doctor, but he would see Jews as a kind of social infection to be eliminated. There are numerous other parallels to this play as well.

Hitler also patterned his political rise somewhat after the title character in Ibsen’s The Master Builder. Hitler had studied architecture some and part of his vision for Germany, as we know, was architectural. His proudest achievement may have been the Autobahn. Some of the Hitler’s oversight of architecture and his treatment of leading architects (whom he called Baumeister, or “master builders”) parallels events in Ibsen’s play.

Though Ibsen was critical of established religion, and he did promote social changes, there is nothing in his life or writings that could be construed as anti-Semitic or nationalistic. Still, it appears Hitler looked to three Ibsen plays for some kind of inspiration. As I was reading, I began thinking of Charles Manson, whose communal “family” committed a series of brutal murders in the Los Angeles area in the late sixties. Manson claimed to be inspired by some Beatles songs and by the science fiction classic Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. Manson identified with Valentine Smith, the protagonist of Stranger, and began to act out the book in his own twisted way. For example, some of his murder victims had forks stuck in them like the way Smith “grokked” things in the book.

Sage does not mention Manson, but he does name some other notorious criminals who patterned their crimes after a work of fiction that seemed to motivate their lives. John Wilkes Booth had been inspired by Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, especially its Brutus “the noblest Roman of them all” who assassinated Caesar to end tyranny. John Hinckley, who stalked President Carter and shot President Reagan (Sage calls Hinckley “nonpartisan”), was inspired by the film Taxi Driver. So Hitler through his life patterned numerous actions of his after Ibsen’s Emperor and Galilean. At some point after becoming the Führer, he actually read some of Julian’s own writings and was further impressed by them.

For reasons made somewhat clear by Sage, Hitler, like Julian, was hostile to Christianity since he had been a young teen. He called it “the worst regression that mankind can ever have undergone” and said that “Such a religion carries within it intolerance and persecution.” Hitler admired Julian and paganism because “The priests of antiquity were closer to nature.” (181) Today Hitler would be called neo-pagan.

Hitler believed, with some other “modernist” interpreters of Christianity, that Jesus was not a Jew and that his simple ideas had been “Judaized” by St. Paul who used his missions to get Gentiles to accept Jewish ways. Ibsen had Julian believe something similar. He also portrayed Julian believing that he was the reincarnation of the real, non-Jewish Christ. Hitler would believe the same thing about himself: He was reincarnated by nature to create the Third Empire.

There are many curious behaviors that parallel the three Ibsen plays. A truly odd and perhaps most fatal decision Hitler made was during his invasion of Russia. His army had conquered the Ukraine by early 1942 and had a direct route to Moscow. Military observers and analysts on both Allied and German sides said Moscow could have easily fallen. The city had few defenses, and at the rate Hitler’s army was moving, it would have secured the Soviet capital long before winter. Instead, Hitler inexplicably, and against the judgment of his generals, ordered the army north to Leningrad. The German army got bogged down in Russia and the conquest ultimately failed.

The Emperor Julian had done something similar. He attacked the empire to his east, Persia, and was heading for its capital. Intelligence warned him of a trap, so he turned north. It seemed like Hitler was imitating his model.

Julian had earlier made a treaty with Persia that he broke. So Hitler broke his pact with Stalin when he attacked the U.S.S.R. But before Hitler attacked Russia, he reinforced Germany’s western frontiers with a fort and bunker system along the Rhine that the British called the Siegfried Line. Hitler himself always referred to this as the Limes (Latin, two syllables), the term Julian used for the fortifications he set up along the Rhine before beginning his campaign to the East.

These are just a few of the many parallels that Sage brings up in his book. Perhaps it is a little freaky, perhaps prophetic in a negative way, but three of Ibsen’s dramas became models for Hitler: for his military campaigns, for his personal beliefs, and for his political maneuverings. Ibsen and Hitler shows us how.