Month: October 2017
'Antisemitismus und Eliteerziehung in den Nationalpolitischen Erziehungsanstalten'Stiftung niedersächsische Gedenkstätten - Jahresbericht: Schwerpunktthema - Kindheit im Nationalsozialismus (2017), pp. 12-17.
This essay explores various ways in which the Napolas (aka Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten), the Third Reich’s most prominent elite-schools, were implicated in anti-Semitic agitation and, ultimately, the Holocaust. Case studies include Napola Spandau’s anti-Jewish campaign on the Frisian island of Wyk auf Föhr, and attempts to expropriate Jewish property by the authorities at the Napola in Haselünne.Read more...
'Classics and Education in the Third Reich: "Die Alten Sprachen" and the Nazification of Latin- and Greek-teaching in secondary schools'in Brill's Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, ed. Helen Roche, Kyriakos Demetriou, Leiden (Brill) 2018, pp. 283-63.
Focusing upon a specific corpus of articles published in Die Alten Sprachen, the Classics teachers’ periodical produced by the Nazi Teachers’ League, this article examines the ways in which the Nazi regime sought to politicise the Classics for educational purposes. Classics teachers in the Third Reich constantly sought to present the ancient past as an explicit “paradigm and warning” for the National Socialist present.Read more...
New Publication: 'Blüte und Zerfall'Helen's article, 'Blüte und Zerfall: "Schematic Narrative Templates" of decline and fall in völkisch and National Socialist racial ideology', has just been published by Berghahn books in a volume entitled The Persistence of Race: Continuity and Change in Germany from the Wilhelmine Empire to National Socialism, edited by Lara Day and Oliver Haag.
“This is an impressively coherent and highly engaging volume.” · Dan Stone, Royal Holloway, University of London.Read more...
'Blüte und Zerfall: "Schematic Narrative Templates" of decline and fall in völkisch and National Socialist racial ideology'in The Persistence of Race: Continuity and Change in Germany from the Wilhelmine Empire to National Socialism, ed. Lara Day, Oliver Haag, Oxford (Berghahn) 2017, pp. 65-86.
At the turn of the 20th century, the idea that the destinies of races, nations and empires were universal and biologically determined (whenever in human history they existed) was the preserve of a minority of racial theorists and academics. However, within a few decades, such ideas came to dominate National Socialist thought, and were propagated in ideological and educational material throughout the Third Reich.Read more...