Year: 2013

Review of David B. Dennis' Inhumanities. Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), in Reviews in History.

For the past few years, David B. Dennis has had the unenviable task of steeping himself in the (turgid, yet strangely compelling) prose of the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi party’s major propaganda organ, and the Third Reich’s daily paper of choice. The result is a synoptic compendium of National Socialist thought on major cultural and artistic figures, which is both chilling in the delusion it reveals, and startling in its originality.Read more...

Review of Anne C. Nagel's Hitlers Bildungsreformer. Das Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung 1934-1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2012), in Reviews in History.

What's in a name? Often, particularly with books marketed at a more popular audience, all too much seems to be at stake - the controversy caused by Paul Preston's The Spanish Holocaust being a recent case in point. Thus far, criticism of Anne C. Nagel's 2012 volume, Hitlers Bildungsreformer, has followed similar lines.Read more...

Review of Moritz Föllmer's in Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), published in the Book Reviews section of the Wiener Library Blog.

All too often, it is glibly assumed that the rise of individuality, the spirit of modernity, and the triumph of democracy must necessarily go hand in hand. Moritz Föllmer’s new monograph provides an important corrective to this frequently uninterrogated set of assumptions.Read more...

Review of Christian Ingrao's Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), published in the Book Reviews section of the Wiener Library Blog.

In 2006, a publishing sensation erupted in France with the publication of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, a novel which sought to recreate the motivation and incremental brutalisation of an intelligent, educated SS officer, as he becomes ever more damningly implicated in the horrors of the Holocaust.Read more...

Review of Jason Crouthamel's An Intimate History of the Front: Masculinity, Sexuality, and German Soldiers in the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), in Reviews in History

In his classic thriller Greenmantle, first published in 1916, John Buchan describes his hero Richard Hannay's first encounter with his adversary, the German officer Colonel Ulrich von Stumm, in a fashion which hints at a hidden strain of sexual deviance within the German armed forces:Read more...

The last two months have seen the appearance of two articles on very different topics. The first, entitled '"Anti-Enlightenment": National Socialist educators’ troubled relationship with humanism and the philhellenist tradition', was published in the latest issue of Publications of the English Goethe Society, a special issue dedicated to the topic of German philhellenism. The second, entitled ‘Spartan Supremacy: A “Possession for Ever”? Early fourth-century expectations of enduring ascendancy’, appeared earlier this month in an edited volume on Hindsight in Greek and Roman History.Read more...

On 13 December 2013, Helen Roche and Carol Atack hosted the Legacy of Greek Political Thought Network Workshop, a one-day colloquium which took place at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge.Read more...

On 11 November 2013, Helen presented a paper entitled 'Narrating the Fall of Empires in Weimar and National Socialist Racial Ideology' to the Fieldnotes Seminar at the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH).Read more...

Presented at the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) Fieldnotes Seminar, 11 November 2013.Read more...

Helen has recently contributed to a distance-learning course which is currently offered by the University of Leicester, entitled 'Deconstructing Sparta'. The coursebook contains ten thematic chapters, which aim to synthesise the most up-to-date scholarship on Sparta in an engaging and readable fashion. The chapters also include guides to further reading, study questions, and notes towards further exploration of the topic in question.

Helen's chapter, entitled 'Later Reception and Modern Recreation of Sparta', charts the development of Spartan reception through the ages.Read more...