"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.... During World War I German patriotic propaganda vaunted the superiority of Germany’s supposedly rooted, organic, spiritual Kultur over the allegedly effete, shallow, cosmopolitan, materialist, Jewish-influenced 'civilization' of Western Europe.... Hitler invested considerable money and time in the 1930s, and even after World War II began, in an effort to take over Europe’s cultural organizations and turn them into instruments of German power.... Goebbels and Hitler were as obsessed with movies as American adolescents are today with social media. Convinced that cinema was their era’s main engine of cultural influence, they tried to control filmmaking as far as their influence could reach.... The dominance of American films had troubled European filmmakers and intellectuals from the beginning.... Hitler’s efforts to stem the mass appeal of Hollywood films and jazz only made them... more seductive and, in a final irony, prepared for the triumph of American music, jeans, and film in the postwar world by trying to make them taboo...."

From "The Cultural Axis" in The New York Review of Books. The reviewed book is "The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture."