an efflores- cence in the arts. "The identity of a people and of a civilization is re- flected and concentrated" in culture, Kundera writes. "If this identity is threatened with extinction, cultural life grows correspondingly more intense."
But even as culture was increasing in importance in captive Central Europe, it was declining in Western Europe. Indeed, Kundera be- lieves, the mass-communications media have supplanted culture there: Sophisticated Western Europeans now discuss...
MacGre- And Germany gor Knox, in Journal of Modem History
(Mar. 1984), University of Chicago Press,
P.O. Box 37005, Chicago, 111.60637.
Among scholars, decades of debate have made it harder to see what Adolf Hitler's Germany and Benito Mussolini's Italy had in common and what distinguished their fascism from the other major totalitarian ideology of the 20th century-Marxism.
Knox, a University of Rochester historian, says that the confusion arises because scholars refuse to take the two dictators...
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