Steven F. Sage (born 1947, New York City) is a scholar and former American diplomat who has written on ancient China and on 20th-century Europe. He is an author of two books Ancient Sichuan and the Unification of China (1992) and Ibsen and Hitler (2006). He is currently working on books on the Holocaust in Bulgaria and on the building of the Reichsautobahn.
As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, Sage studied Sinology under Professor Derk Bodde, then proceeded to a doctoral grant from the East–West Center at the University of Hawaii.
In 1981 he entered the United States Foreign Service via the examination system and served two years as vice consul at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Then came language training in Bulgarian and two years at the embassy in Sofia. Sage's colleagues during 1984-1986 included John Beyerle, later the American ambassador to Moscow, and the military attaché Lt. Col. Michael V. Hayden, who went on to direct the National Security Agency and then the Central Intelligence Agency. Their duty in Bulgaria coincided with stepped-up repression by the regime of the country's Turkish minority. Sage obtained initial details from a consular contact, whereupon the embassy investigated and lodged a formal protest with the Bulgarian government. Publicity included Sage's essays in the State Department's annual country-by-country human rights reports to the U.S. Senate, for 1984 and 1985.
In the 1990s, Sage taught history at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, but left without seeking tenure.
Sage's book Ancient Sichuan and the Unification of China presented a seemingly paradoxical thesis: the central, i.e. decisive importance for Chinese antiquity of a peripheral region. Sage evaluated Bronze Age excavations at Sanxingdui (late 2nd millennium BCE) as well as the archaeology of the Shu and Ba states (1st millennium BCE). He moreover translated Qin documents unearthed in Sichuan, revealing the processes of colonization and Sinification in the 4th century BCE. The Sichuanese archaeologist Tong Enzheng approved the draft manuscript of Ancient Sichuan. Victor Mair stated, "Sage rightly focuses on Qin as the agent of incorporation in bringing Sichuan securely within the orbit of China writ large. Had there been no Qin, there would be no China as it has been known for the last two millennia and more. Certainly Sage proves this for Sichuan beyond any reasonable doubt ... When a radical rewriting of Chinese history is carried out during the next century, Sage's contribution will have to be recognized." [1]
Recognition came in the form of an honorific title as Senior Research Fellow of the University of Massachusetts Amherst' Warring States Project, and also with the (unauthorized, abridged) translation into Chinese of Ancient Sichuan and its serialized publication in the Chengdu archaeological journal Si chuan wen wu (四川文物).
While reading about the Nazi engineer Fritz Todt, Sage became intrigued by parallels between the Nazi regime and Ibsen's plays. He found that the construction agency "Organisation Todt" was a huge conglomerate and a major exploiter of slave labor, yet it had been omitted from most historiography. The only published biography of Todt, in German, was subtitled Baumeister des Dritten Reiches, i.e., "Master Builder of the Third Reich". [2] Sage noticed that certain elements in Todt's career matched episodes in Ibsen's Master Builder. Turning to Hitler's Tischgespräche ("Table Talk"), Sage found lines evidently derived from the Ibsen play. Research on Hitler revealed that the dictator had indeed read Ibsen, in German translation.
Sage also studied Ibsen's two-part epic, Emperor and Galilean , about the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, who tried to establish what Ibsen called "the third Reich". Julian dies onstage but the play ends with a declaration that he will return, reincarnated, to found the prophesied Third Reich. Paraphrases in Hitler's recorded conversation indicated knowledge of that drama. The play had been venerated by a German literary cult in the early 20th century.
Furthermore, Sage found that, in several instances, Ibsen's plays had influenced not only Hitler's conversations, but also his policies. Ibsen and Hitler was published on the centenary of Ibsen's death in May 2006. The University of Oslo history professor Hans Fredrik Dahl wrote in Dagbladet: "More thorough than anyone before him, Steven Sage has gone through the material around the young Hitler and his literary sources. His work encompasses much new research and draws conclusions in many different directions. That there was an actual line of influence between Ibsen and the young Hitler is to me beyond doubt." [3] In an Amazon review, Robert A. Michael (co-author of A Dictionary of Anti-Semitism) called Sage's findings the "golden key" to understanding Hitler. [4]
However, experts in the fields of Nazism and the Holocaust have either ignored or decidedly rejected Sage's claims. The book received only one review in a reputable online review journal, which called it methodologically flawed, "highly speculative", and states that Ibsen and Hitler adds virtually nothing to our understanding of Hitler, Nazi antisemitism, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust. [5]
Having entered Holocaust-related research, Sage went on to explore the question of Bulgaria's repression of its Jewish minority during World War II. In a forthcoming book, Sage explains how 80 percent of the country’s Jews survived, though they endured forced labor, loss of civil rights, expropriation of all assets, eviction, and ghettoization. Sage is also working on a book about the Reichsautobahn and Organisation Todt.
His Chinese name is 史蒂文 (Shi Diwen).
Organisation Todt was a civil and military engineering organisation in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, named for its founder, Fritz Todt, an engineer and senior Nazi. The organisation was responsible for a huge range of engineering projects both in Nazi Germany and in occupied territories from France to the Soviet Union during World War II. It became notorious for using forced labour. From 1943 until 1945 during the late phase of the Third Reich, OT administered all constructions of concentration camps to supply forced labour to industry.
Fritz Todt was a German construction engineer and senior Nazi who rose from the position of Inspector General for German Roadways, in which he directed the construction of the German autobahns (Reichsautobahnen), to become the Reich Minister for Armaments and Ammunition. From that position, he directed the entire German wartime military economy.
Mischling was a pejorative legal term which was used in Nazi Germany to denote persons of mixed "Aryan" and non-Aryan, such as Jewish, ancestry as they were classified by the Nuremberg racial laws of 1935. In German, the word has the general denotation of hybrid, mongrel, or half-breed. Outside its use in official Nazi terminology, the term Mischlingskinder was later used to refer to war babies born to non-white soldiers and German mothers in the aftermath of World War II.
Hans Mommsen was a German historian, known for his studies in German social history, for his functionalist interpretation of the Third Reich, and especially for arguing that Adolf Hitler was a weak dictator. Descended from Nobel Prizewinning historian Theodor Mommsen, he was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.
Paul Bonatz was a German architect, member of the Stuttgart School and professor at the technical university in that city during part of World War II, and from 1954 until his death. He worked in many styles, but most often in a simplified neo-Romanesque, and designed important public buildings both in the Weimar Republic and under the Third Reich, including major bridges for the new autobahns. In 1943 he designed several buildings in Turkey, returning to Stuttgart in 1954.
Ba was an ancient state in eastern Sichuan, China. Its original capital was Yicheng, Hubei. Ba was conquered by Qin in 316 BC. The historical Bo people and the modern Tujia people trace some of their origins back to the people of Ba.
Shu, also known as Ancient Shu in historiography, was an ancient kingdom in what is now Sichuan Province. It was based on the Chengdu Plain, in the western Sichuan basin with some extension northeast to the upper Han River valley. To the east was the Ba tribal confederation. Further east down the Han and Yangtze rivers was the State of Chu. To the north over the Qinling Mountains was the State of Qin. To the west and south were tribal peoples of little military power.
Saul Friedländer is a Czech-Jewish-born historian and a professor emeritus of history at UCLA.
Li Bing was a Chinese hydraulic engineer and politician of the Warring States period. He served the state of Qin as an administrator and is revered for his work on the Dujiangyan River Control System, which both controlled flooding and provided irrigation water year-round, greatly increasing the productivity of the valley. Li Bing became a cultural icon, known as the vanquisher of the River God and is compared to the Great Yu.
Peter Paul Freiherr von Eltz-Rübenach was Reich Postal Minister (Reichspostminister) and Reich Minister of Transport (Reichsminister für Verkehr) of Germany between 1932 and 1937.
The use of slave and forced labour in Nazi Germany and throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II took place on an unprecedented scale. It was a vital part of the German economic exploitation of conquered territories. It also contributed to the mass extermination of populations in occupied Europe. The Germans abducted approximately 12 million people from almost twenty European countries; about two thirds came from Central Europe and Eastern Europe. Many workers died as a result of their living conditions – extreme mistreatment, severe malnutrition, and worse tortures were the main causes of death. Many more became civilian casualties from enemy (Allied) bombing and shelling of their workplaces throughout the war. At its peak the forced labourers constituted 20% of the German work force. Counting deaths and turnover, about 15 million men and women were forced labourers at one point during the war.
Joseph Wulf was a German-Polish Jewish historian. A survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, he was the author of several books about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, including Das Dritte Reich und die Juden ; Heinrich Himmler (1960); and Martin Bormann: Hitlers Schatten (1962). The House of the Wannsee Conference museum in Berlin houses the Joseph Wulf Library in his honour.
Wilhelm Karl Keppler was a German businessman and one of Adolf Hitler's early financial backers. Introduced to Hitler by Heinrich Himmler, Keppler helped to finance the Nazi Party and later served as one of Hitler's economic advisors.
Franz Xaver Dorsch was a German civil engineer who became the chief engineer of the Organisation Todt (OT), a civil and military engineering group in Nazi Germany that was responsible for a huge range of engineering projects at home and in the territories occupied by the Germans during the Second World War. He played a leading role in many of the Third Reich's biggest engineering projects, including the construction of the Siegfried Line (Westwall), the Atlantic Wall and numerous other fortifications in Germany and occupied Europe. Following the war, he founded the Dorsch Consult consulting engineering company in Wiesbaden.
The Reichsautobahn system was the beginning of the German autobahns under Nazi Germany. There had been previous plans for controlled-access highways in Germany under the Weimar Republic, and two had been constructed, but work had yet to start on long-distance highways. After previously opposing plans for a highway network, the Nazis embraced them after coming to power and presented the project as Hitler's own idea. They were termed "Adolf Hitler's roads" and presented as a major contribution to the reduction of unemployment. Other reasons for the project included enabling Germans to explore and appreciate their country, and there was a strong aesthetic element to the execution of the project under the Third Reich; military applications, although to a lesser extent than has often been thought; a permanent monument to the Third Reich, often compared to the pyramids; and general promotion of motoring as a modernization that in itself had military applications.
This is a list of books about Nazi Germany, the state that existed in Germany during the period from 1933 to 1945, when its government was controlled by Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers' Party. It also includes some important works on the development of Nazi imperial ideology, totalitarianism, German society during the era, the formation of anti-Semitic racial policies, the post-war ramifications of Nazism, along with various conceptual interpretations of the Third Reich.
The Mangfall Bridge is a motorway bridge across the valley of the Mangfall north of Weyarn in Upper Bavaria, Germany, which carries Bundesautobahn 8 between Munich and Rosenheim. The original bridge, designed by German Bestelmeyer, opened in January 1936 as one of the first large bridges in the Reichsautobahn system and was influential in its design. Destroyed at the end of World War II, this bridge was replaced with a temporary structure in 1948; the current bridge consists of a replacement built in 1958–60 to a design by Gerd Lohmer and Ulrich Finsterwalder and a second span for traffic in one direction which was added in the late 1970s when the autobahn was widened to six lanes.
The Holocaust in Bulgaria was the persecution of Jews between 1941 and 1944 in the Kingdom of Bulgaria and their deportation and annihilation in the Bulgarian-occupied regions of Yugoslavia and Greece during World War II, arranged by the Nazi Germany-allied government of Tsar Boris III and prime minister Bogdan Filov. The persecution began in 1941 with the passing of anti-Jewish legislation and culminated in March 1943 with the arrest and deportation of almost all – 11,343 – of the Jews living in Bulgarian-occupied regions of Northern Greece, Yugoslav Macedonia and Pirot. These were deported by the Bulgarian authorities and sent to extermination camps in German-occupied Poland.
The comparative ranks of Nazi Germany contrasts the ranks of the Wehrmacht to a number of national-socialist organisations in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 in a synoptic table. Nazi organisations used a hierarchical structure, according to the so-called Führerprinzip, and were oriented in line with the rank order system of the Wehrmacht.
Nazi architecture is the architecture promoted by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime from 1933 until its fall in 1945, connected with urban planning in Nazi Germany. It is characterized by three forms: a stripped neoclassicism, typified by the designs of Albert Speer; a vernacular style that drew inspiration from traditional rural architecture, especially alpine; and a utilitarian style followed for major infrastructure projects and industrial or military complexes. Nazi ideology took a pluralist attitude to architecture; however, Hitler himself believed that form follows function and wrote against "stupid imitations of the past".