Sage, Steven F. 1947-

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Sage, Steven F. 1947-

PERSONAL: Born 1947.

ADDRESSES: Home— Rockville, MD. E-mail— SFSage@aol.com.

CAREER: Writer and historian. University of Massachusetts, senior research fellow; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, research fellow, 2005; former officer in the U.S. foreign service.

WRITINGS

Ancient Sichuan and the Unification of China, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1992.

Ibsen and Hitler: The Playwright, the Plagiarist, and the Plot for the Third Reich, Carroll & Graf (New York, NY), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS: Steven F. Sage is a writer and historian who serves as a senior research fellow at the University of Massachusetts and was a research fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2005. In Ancient Sichuan and the Unification of China, Sage offers a “fine study of the archaeology, history, and culture of one of China’s most pivotal regions, Sichuan Province,” noted Chun-Shu Chan in the Journal of Asian Studies. Sage looks at the prehistory of the province and at the two ancient subregions that once made up Sichuan: Ba in the east and Shu in the west. He describes the influential Kingdom of Qin and how the Qin made the best use of the region’s human resources and material wealth to thrive, expand, and conquer neighboring states. Sage also asserts that it was the Qin who helped unify the ancient Chinese world, a position that Chan called “challenging.” Sage also describes in detail recent, significant archaeological finds in Sanxingdui and elsewhere in the region, then “exploits the welter of recent findings by Chinese archaeologists to reconstruct the origins of civilization in Sichuan and the process whereby Sichuan was eventually integrated into a unified Sinitic polity under the Qin empire,” stated Richard von Glahn in the American Historical Review.

Sage engages in another controversial reconsideration of history in Ibsen and Hitler: The Playwright, the Plagiarist, and the Plot for the Third Reich. In this book Sage suggests a strong connection between the works of playwright Henrik Ibsen and the life and behavior of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Sage asserts that “Hitler’s life followed a ‘script’ based on his reading of three Ibsen plays”:The Master Builder, An Enemy of the People, and Emperor and Galilean, commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer. In Sage’s interpretation, Hitler was so profoundly influenced by Ibsen’s plays that “these works not only scripted Hitler’s self-image but also guided his political and military strategy,” noted Booklist reviewer Brendan Driscoll. In his research Sage found direct reference to Ibsen’s plays in Hitler’s writings and papers. More importantly to Sage, he also detects parallels between Ibsen’s works and the events that marked Hitler’s rise to power. A Kirkus Reviews critic called Sage’s position “a thesis that will provoke deliberation, debate, outrage and probably a little laughter.” However, Library Journal reviewer Dan Forrest concluded that even readers who disagree with Sage’s “sense of import about his discovery and conclusions will still find much of interest here.”

Sage told CA:“The findings in Ibsen and Hitler came inadvertently, and as a surprise. I didn’t make this stuff up; I merely happened to stumble on it. You look for one thing, you find another; that’s the process of discovery. Ibsen and Hitler isn’t conjecture, not what-iffing, not speculation, not the sort of thing anyone could invent no matter what they smoke. The facts ma’am, just the facts. Empirical facts.

“Documenting Ibsen and Hitler showed me that there are real secrets still hidden out there, of tremendous consequence, ready to be found if you seize upon a lead and follow it come what may. Even if they flout the received wisdom, just keep going where the clues take you.”