The Cultural Axis - book review: The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture, by Benjamin Martin

The New York Review of Books: The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture by Benjamin G. Martin Harvard University Press: "We do not normally associate Hitler and Mussolini’s violent and aggressive regimes with “soft power.” But the two dictators were would-be intellectuals—Adolf Hitler a failed painter inebriated with the music of Wagner, and Mussolini a onetime schoolteacher and novelist. Unlike American philistines, they thought literature and the arts were important, and wanted to weaponize them as adjuncts to military conquest. Benjamin Martin’s illuminating book The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture adds a significant dimension to our understanding of how the Nazi and Fascist empires were constructed. Martin’s book shows how vigorously the Nazis applied this...

The New York Review of Books: The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture by Benjamin G. Martin Harvard University Press: "We do not normally associate Hitler and Mussolini’s violent and aggressive regimes with “soft power.” But the two dictators were would-be intellectuals—Adolf Hitler a failed painter inebriated with the music of Wagner, and Mussolini a onetime schoolteacher and novelist. Unlike American philistines, they thought literature and the arts were important, and wanted to weaponize them as adjuncts to military conquest. Benjamin Martin’s illuminating book The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture adds a significant dimension to our understanding of how the Nazi and Fascist empires were constructed. Martin’s book shows how vigorously the Nazis applied this traditional construct. Hitler invested considerable money and time in the 1930s, and even after World War II WWII began, in an effort to take over Europe’s cultural organizations and turn them into instruments of German power.