https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/13/culture-in-the-third-reich-by-moritz-follmer-review-when-fascism-stole-the-show

This weighty study reveals how the Nazis exploited films and theatre to spread their poisonous ideology

Even before the Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933, they had placed their tanks on the battlefield of the imagination. “Event culture” with darker undertones was in full swing. A heady mixture of pagan-inspired rituals, firework displays launched on river boats and rallies with folk music was the nationalist answer to the freewheeling modernism of the Weimar Republic.

Moritz Föllmer is a heterodox scholar, who applies a sharp cultural lens to metropolitan life, politics and individual strivings and pastimes as the backdrop to disaster falling on Germany. The cultural offerings of national socialism, he believes, held such mesmerising appeal for so many Germans precisely because it commanded a range of tastes from middle-class conservatism to emerging mass culture – a combination that “mobilised vast energies” across the population by appealing to fustian sorts and neophytes alike.