Year: 2013
Review of 'Making Prussians, Raising Germans' by Jasper HeinzenReview of State-Building after Civil War, 1866-1935, by Jasper Heinzen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), in German History 35 (3), September 2018, pp. 454-6.
Jasper Heinzen’s first monograph aims to reframe historical interpretations of ‘1866 and all that’, focusing on the ramifications of civil war within Germany, rather than privileging external conflicts with Italy and Austria. What consequences did enduring tensions between Prussian imperial and provincial particularist ambitions have for Germany's eventual stability?Read more...
Review of 'The Greco-German Affair in the Euro Crisis' by Claudia Sternberg et al.Review of Claudia Sternberg (et al.), The Greco-German Affair in the Euro Crisis: Mutual Recognition Lost (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), published on the UCL European Studies Blog, 29 October 2018.
This timely, concise, richly illustrated and highly readable survey by Claudia Sternberg, Kira Gartzou-Katsouyanni, and Kalypso Nicolaïdis provides a nuanced approach to the recent vicissitudes of the Greco-German relationship.Read more...
Review of 'The Oxford Illustrated History of the Third Reich'Review of The Oxford Illustrated History of the Third Reich, ed. Robert Gelatelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), published in History: The Journal of the Historical Association 104, Issue 362, October 2019, 783-5.
With the editorship of a new illustrated history of the Third Reich aimed at a popular readership comes both great responsibility and great opportunity – a challenge to which Robert Gellately, one of those historians who has done most to shape the historiography of Nazi Germany recently, has risen with aplomb.Read more...
Classics and National SocialismReview of Klio und die Nationalsozialisten: Gesammelte Schriften zur Wissenschafts und Rezeptionsgeschichte (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 2017), published in The Classical Review 69 (2), October 2019, pp. 666-7.
Volker Losemann’s work has rightly been hailed as pioneering in its efforts to bring to light the ideological distortions and academic opportunism to which Classical and ancient historical scholarship were subjected during the Third Reich. Read more...
Review of 'The "New Man" in Radical Right Ideology and Practice, 1919-1945'Review of The “New Man” in Radical Right Ideology and Practice, 1919-1945, ed. Jorge Dagnino, Matthew Feldman, and Paul Stocker (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), published in Reviews in History, review no. 2386, April 2020.
During the interwar period, the figure of the ‘New Man’ constituted a powerful symbol of the promise and potential of a thorough-going political and anthropological revitalisation of society, which could effectively counteract widely-perceived notions of crisis and decline in the aftermath of the Great War.Read more...
New monograph publication: 'Sparta's German Children'A monograph based on Helen's doctoral research, entitled Sparta's German Children: The ideal of ancient Sparta in the Royal Prussian Cadet-Corps, 1818-1920, and in National Socialist elite schools (the Napolas), 1933-1945, has just been published by the Classical Press of Wales.
"From the eighteenth century until 1945, German children were taught to model themselves on the young of an Ancient Greek city-state: Sparta..."Read more...
On 13 February 2013, Helen presented a paper entitled '"Neither Political nor National Socialist": Former Nazi elite-school pupils' conflicts with their contested pasts' at an international conference on Memories of Conflict, Conflicts of Memory, which was held at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London.Read more...
Presented at an international conference on 'Memories of Conflict, Conflicts of Memory', Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, 13 February 2013.Read more...
New publication: 'The Leaders of the Third Reich and the Spartan Nationalist Paradigm'Helen's article, '"In Sparta fühlte ich mich wie in einer deutschen Stadt" (Goebbels): The Leaders of the Third Reich and the Spartan Nationalist paradigm' has just been published in a volume entitled English and German Nationalist and Antisemitic Discourse, 1871-1945, edited by Felicity Rash, Geraldine Horan and Daniel Wildmann.
The article is based on a paper presented at an eponyomous conference which took place at Queen Mary, University of London, in November 2010.Read more...
Books worth (re)readingReview essay, published in the International Journal of Play 5 (3), 2016 (special issue on Histories of Play, edited by Kate Darian-Smith and Simon Sleight), pp. 343-345.Featuring George Eisen's Children and Play in the Holocaust: Games Among the Shadows (1988); Nicholas Stargardt's Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (2006); Heidi Rosenbaum's “Und trotzdem war’s ’ne schöne Zeit”: Kinderalltag im Nationalsozialismus (2014), and Bastian Fleermann and Benedikt Mauer (eds) Kriegskinder: Kriegskindheiten in Düsseldorf 1939–1945 (2015).Read more...