'Schulische Erziehung und Entbürgerlichung'

in Wie bürgerlich war der Nationalsozialismus?, ed. Norbert Frei, Göttingen (Wallstein), 2018, pp. 154-72.

This article uses the elite education provided by the Napolas (Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten), the Third Reich’s most prominent elite schools, as a case study of the manifold ways in which elements of a bürgerlich habitus were cultivated during the Third Reich, despite the Nazi movement’s claims to embody socialist principles.

Given sufficient time, it seems highly likely that the Napolas would have become instrumental in helping to consolidate a new, National Socialist caste structure – a class system of stratification based no longer on the twin pillars of bourgeois society, ‘Besitz und Bildung’, but on the uncompromising values of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft.

A full version of this article has now been published in English in Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Daniel Gerster, Felicity Jenz, Basingstoke (Palgrave Macmillan), 2022, pp. 79-100.

This article forms part of a long-standing research project on the history of the Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten.