Year: 2012

in Publications of the English Goethe Society 82 (3), 2013, pp. 193-207.

This article examines some of the ways in which scholars and educators under National Socialism attempted to construct a model of philhellenism for the ‘Thousand Year Reich’ which explicitly defined itself as descended from, yet opposed to, earlier manifestations of the phenomenon, especially as personified by Enlightenment figures such as Winckelmann and Goethe. They also proclaimed a return to the true, ‘living’ spirit of the original Greek gymnasion.Read more...

Helen's article, '"Go, tell the Prussians...": The Spartan paradigm in Prussian military thought during the long nineteenth century', has just been published in New Voices in Classical Reception Studies e-journal.

You can view the article in its entirety here.Read more...

in English and German Nationalist and Antisemitic Discourse, 1871-1945, ed. Felicity Rash, Geraldine Horan, Daniel Wildmann, Oxford (Peter Lang) 2013, pp. 91-115.

This article examines some of the ways in which many of the Third Reich's leading figures (including Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, Rust and Rosenberg) treated Sparta as the perfect paradigm of a racially-pure warrior-state, as well as claiming that, in a certain sense, the Reich was Sparta incarnate.Read more...

Helen’s article ‘"Spartanische Pimpfe": The Importance of Sparta in the Educational Ideology of the Adolf Hitler Schools’, in Sparta in Modern Thought, ed. Stephen Hodkinson, Ian Macgregor Morris (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales), has been acclaimed as a 'lucid analysis' by the Bryn Mawr Classical Review.Read more...

On 6 July 2012, Helen presented a paper entitled 'Xenophon and the Nazis, or: How to Read the Anabasis in the Third Reich, and other Classical classroom propaganda' at the 81st Anglo-American Conference of Historians, Institute of Historical Research, University of London.Read more...

in Hindsight in Greek and Roman History, ed. Anton Powell, Swansea (Classical Press of Wales) 2013, pp. 91-112.

This article explores and analyses the ways in which historians, both modern and ancient, have applied hindsight to the Spartan empire of 404-371 B.C., and to its downfall. Many modern treatments of the period are even labelled as studies in Spartan failure, and thus betray a tendency to over-emphasise error and lack of foresight on the part of Sparta.Read more...

in Sparta in Modern Thought. Politics, History and Culture, ed. Stephen Hodkinson, Ian Macgregor Morris, Swansea (Classical Press of Wales) 2012, pp. 315-42.

This article explores the ways in which an ancient history textbook by the well-known archaeologist and educator Otto-Wilhelm von Vacano, entitled 'Sparta: The Life-Struggle of an Aryan Master Race', was used to encourage pupils at the Adolf Hitler Schools to identify with young Spartans, and to see Spartan history in proto-National Socialist terms.Read more...

On 12 April 2012, Helen presented a paper at the Classical Association annual conference, University of Exeter, entitled 'Youth of Sparta and of Mars: Uses and Abuses of Classics at the Royal Prussian Cadet-Corps'.Read more...

On the 2nd of April 2012, Helen presented a paper entitled '"Wanderer, kommst du nach Preußen....": Sparta as a model in Prussian military thought during the long nineteenth century' at the Association for German Studies annual conference, University of Edinburgh. Read more...

An informal blog review considering the flaws in Jörg Muth's portrayal of the Prussian Cadet Corps in chapter 3 of his monograph Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901-1940, and the Consequences for World War II (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2011).Read more...