At a time when the European Union (EU) finds itself in the crossfire of populist movements, its prehistory attracts new and, at times, provocative scholarship. Some scholars have discerned, for instance, important roots of the economic community in the collaboration of Vichy France with Adolf Hitler's Germany (e.g., Annie Lacroix-Riz, Industriels at banquiers français sous l'Occupation [1999]). Now Benjamin Martin sets out to upend our understanding of European culture by pointing to the cultural axis between Hitler's Nazism and Benito Mussolini's fascism as an important basis for the organizational shape of European culture today. Based on an impressive exploration of numerous German and Italian archival sources, Martin succeeds in putting the much-neglected cultural relationship between the two dictatorships into the present-day context of growing interest in Pan-European cultural organizations and reemerging cultural nationalism. He argues in this extremely readable book that the cultural Berlin–Rome Axis should be understood as a powerful instrument for implementing a new order—not just as a fruitful collaboration between two state-sponsored national cultures, but as part of the creation of a “Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture” as a whole.

In a series of chapters organized chronologically, Martin presents the efforts of German and Italian functionaries to use international associations, festivals, and political networks to organize music, film, and literature into exemplars of a new cultural order that would strengthen the leadership claims of both powers against Western liberalism and Eastern communism. Martin singles out the Permanent Council for International Cooperation among Composers, founded in Venice in 1934, which elevated Richard Strauss to the position of president (and had a strong advocate in composer Adriano Lualdi); the International Film Congress, founded in Berlin in 1935 and reorganized in 1941 as the International Film Chamber, as a strong force against Hollywood; the Union of National Journalists’ Organizations, founded in Vienna in 1941; and the European Writers’ Union, an exclusive initiative by Joseph Goebbels, which brought together in Weimar conservative writers from many countries in 1941 and 1942. Martin's emphasis is on the collaborative nature of this “European” project, which, he argues, did not grow out of a particularly strong affinity between the two cultures, but which, on the contrary, had to overcome vigorous antipathies on both sides. It was from the very beginning, therefore, the pet project of a group of functionaries, as well as of a limited number of ambitious and mostly conservative musicians, intellectuals, and artists.

The ideas of Europe and a shared European culture did not play serious roles in Nazi propaganda until after the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union—where the fight against Joseph Stalin's communism was labeled a defense of Europe against barbarism once Hitler's armies got stuck in mud and snow. Martin nevertheless unearths an astounding number of programs and pronouncements from prior years that had made Europe a widely acceptable reference for various international, border-crossing, cultural ventures by the two regimes. The European label exerted its strongest sway on cinema, where even the international Venice Film Biennale took on the anti-American tinge with which Goebbels had colored German film production. The highpoint of invoking cultural leadership for this vaguely defined Europe came in the years 1940–1941, after the fall of democratic and universalist-minded France and the creation of the Vichy regime as the embodiment of the long suppressed conservative forces of France. Hitler, who frequently expressed his loathing of the idea of Europe as a strategic goal for National Socialist expansion, is almost sidelined in this study in favor of Goebbels, whom Martin credits with playing the European card with abandon. The author points out that Hitler exempted Goebbels from his rejection of policies with a “European” character, but his November 1942 decree against “demonstrations of a European and international kind” confirms Hitler's strong objections: “The planning, preparation and execution of demonstrations of a European or international kind, such as congresses, assemblies, the founding of associations etc., must cease” (Walter Lipgens, ed., Documents on the History of European Integration, vol. 1 [1985], 109).

In general, Martin does not overlook the differences between the Italian and German sides of this “European” project of cultural politics. Yet, his exclusive focus on the work of functionaries and officials, whose activities tended to emphasize collaboration in the spirit of a new European order, omits much of the antagonism, distance, and indifference that existed between German and Italian intellectuals, artists, filmmakers, and musicians in the 1930s and 1940s. Assessing the weight of the European idea for the new order in Europe in a perceptive discussion of Hitler's European policies, Peter Krüger sarcastically concluded that pompous, European-“enhanced” (überhöhte) ersatz events had to be created in order to cover up the vagueness and unbridgeable discrepancies of certain concepts about Europe (“Hitlers Europapolitik,” in Der Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Ideologie und Herrschaft, ed. Wolfgang Benz et al. [1993], 127). Krüger's sarcasm is well placed given the nature of these ventures, most of which were meant to cover up blatant attempts at national self-enhancement. Their substance did not amount to the amalgam of Nazism and fascism suggested by the phrase Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture.

Martin's evenhanded approach to fascist and National Socialist actors is to be commended, but cannot overcome the fact that most public debates in Germany about Europe after 1940 are devoid of serious reflections concerning Mussolini's fascism. The country that received the most attention was France, because its defeat enabled the Nazis to develop a new, German-dominated narrative about Europe. In her comprehensive study of cultural relations between Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, Angela Hoffend appears to have rightly emphasized the distance—at least as much as the collaboration—between the two regimes (Zwischen Kultur-Achse und Kulturkampf [1998]). The fact that Italy hosted many German exiles in music and literature, and that the Italian reading public showed little interest in Nazi literature—while welcoming the work of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Leon Feuchtwanger, Stefan Zweig, and other exile writers—only corroborates this point.

Looking exclusively at the organizational and propagandistic aspects of cultural policy leaves little space for the cultural and artistic currents of this period. The book mentions almost no film titles and ignores the European project of the Salzburg Festival before 1938, for example, as well as Arturo Toscanini's resolute resistance against fascism and Nazism, which many individuals recognized at the time as a very different notion of “internationalism” in music and the arts. Even Mussolini's dominant role in fascist cultural politics is slighted here: he expressed frustration about Germany's constant push for cultural dominance, and this shadow hung over the 1938 cultural treaty (Kulturabkommen) regulating cultural cooperation between Italy and Germany, which gave each regime a say over the teaching of its national language in the other country.

Martin's book nonetheless enriches the literature through its abundant new research about Nazi and fascist cultural activities. The author's use of a treasure trove of Italian sources neglected by other scholars of the cultural policies of the 1930s and early 1940s make the study especially welcome as well, and his portrayals of influential Italian cultural politicians—such as Giuseppe Bottai, Alessandro Pavolini, Dino Alfieri, and Vittorio Cini—give depth to his account of Italian, not just fascist, cultural policies. By uncovering certain roots of contemporary European cultural politics, this study will be indispensable for scholarship on cultural politics in Europa in the 1930s and 1940s. The overarching thesis that a Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture was in the making seems forced, however; a more comprehensive look at cultural relations between Germany and Italy from 1935 to 1943 does not support that conclusion.