Politics
Like earlier stories such as The Blue Lotus, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and The Broken Ear, King Ottokar's Sceptre had a political subtext. The theft of the sceptre is just part of a plot by Borduria to plunge Syldavia into a major political crisis and clear the way for a foreign invasion.
Written in 1938, the story could have been influenced by the Anschluss of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938. The unseen leader of the conspiracy is called Müsstler, a blend of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Müsstler is the head of the Iron Guard. The name implies that it is a pro-fascist paramilitary group, which were common in Europe between the wars. An actual fascist and anti-Semitic group called the Iron Guard was very active in Romania in the years leading up to the Second World War. The Romanian Iron Guard was often in violent conflict with the king of Romania, King Carol II, who they accused of corruption and being influenced by his Jewish mistress. In fact the year the repression of the Iron Guard commenced was 1938, the year King Ottokar's Sceptre was first serialised. The leader of the Iron Guard, Codreanu, was executed for treason by the Romanian government. The Iron Guard briefly formed the government in 1940 under Horia Sima after the king's abdication but Hitler ended up backing the more conservative General Antonescu in January 1941 and the Iron Guard was eliminated from government and purged.
The German censors did not obstruct the book during the occupation of Belgium during World War II. This could be because there were frequent schemes, plots, wars and coups in the history of the Balkans, many of which had native fascistic movements or governments during the 1930s, and it was not clear that Hergé was specifically targeting National Socialist Germany. Moreover, as discussed above, Germany supported the authoritarian regime in Romania under the aegis of a king, a regime that actually violently repressed the Romanian Iron Guard.
Read more about this topic: King Ottokar's Sceptre
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