An Enemy of the People

Dr. Stockmann’s idea of establishing municipal baths made the community in a coastal town in the south of Norway flourish; the medicinal baths have become the main source of income, and tourism the nexus of development. However, in the midst of the enthusiastic anticipation of a successful tourist season and international success, Dr. Stockmann finds out that the “town's pulsating heart”, as he once called the baths, is in fact a pest-house. The ambitious mayor, the doctor's brother, only sees this discovery as a scandalous lie, because repairing the water pipes, baths, and the sources of pollution would be far too costly and would – of course – change, maybe even stop, the profitable plans. The doctor, certain of the townspeople’s support, starts to fight the authorities for the rights of safe drinking water, a clean environment, and honesty towards the guests in the baths, but …

Henrik Ibsen, the great Norwegian dramatist, expresses in An Enemy of the People his distaste for social limitations and lies that he also had to face when the public vehemently refused his previous plays and tried to distance itself from the non-compromising revealing of taboos (A Doll's House and Ghosts). With the doctor's daring thesis that “it is the masses, the crowd, the compact majority, that have the monopoly of broad-mindedness and morality ”, the polluted baths are established as a symbol of the corruption of the society. Today, however, the focal critical point of the surprisingly actual diagnosis of the functioning of the (bourgeois) world might be summed up in the question: what does non-conformism – considered an ideal and a value in European history ever since Socrates’ death – mean today?