Month: July 2025
Presentation and film-screening at the Historisches Seminar, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, 22 July 2025.Read more...
Presented with Alexander Mayer at an international workshop on 'Social Mobility, Meritocracy, and Dictatorship in 20th-Century Europe', Bundeswehr-Universität München, 21 July 2025.Read more...
Since 2022, Helen has been working on a documentary project featuring a collection of video interviews with surviving former pupils of the National Political Education Institutes (Napolas), Nazi Germany's leading elite schools. The short documentary, which has been created in both English- and German-language versions, premiered in Potsdam in May, at the launch of Helen's exhibition on the Napola in Potsdam.Read more...
'Kadettengeschichten: The Siren Call of Militarism in the Prussian Cadet-School Story'in The German National Imagination from the Early Modern Period to the Present: Cultural Identities in a Changing Landscape. Essays for Joachim Whaley, ed. Charlotte Woodford, Anita Bunyan, and Margarete Tiessen, Cambridge (Legenda Press), 2025, pp. 96-112.
This essay investigates a little-known genre of German children's literature, the Prussian cadet-school story, exploring the glorification of patriotic feeling and martial career propspects in volumes such as Paul von Szczepanski’s Spartanerjünglinge (Spartan Youths) and Johannes van Dewall’s Kadettengeschichten (Cadet-Tales).Read more...