Author: Helen Roche
On 10 November 2017, Helen spoke to around 80 members of the Pförtner Bund, the Schulpforta Old Boys' association, about the school's incarnation as a Napola, at their annual autumn reunion in Berlin.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...
'Distant Models: Italian Fascism, National Socialism and the lure of the Classics'in Brill's Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, ed. Helen Roche, Kyriakos Demetriou, Leiden (Brill) 2018, pp. 3-28.
This introduction to Brill's Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany sets the other contributions to the volume in context.
The ideas in this introduction have been more fully explored in a recent article in Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies.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...
On 29 September 2017, Helen presented a paper entitled 'German Philhellenism and the Making of Western Humanism' at the sixth annual conference of the Society for the History of the Humanities, Somerville College, University of Oxford.Read more...
Presented at 'The Making of the Humanities VI', the sixth annual conference of the Society for the History of the Humanities, Somerville College, University of Oxford, 29 September 2017.Read more...
Public lecture in Nordhausen makes a media splashOn 24 October 2016, Helen gave a public lecture at Nordhausen's Museum Tabakspeicher, entitled 'Napola Ilfeld and other Nazi Elite Schools in Central Germany', organised by Town Archivist Dr. Wolfram Theilemann, in conjunction with the Nordhausen Society for History and Antiquity. The lecture also attracted attention in the local media.Read more...
Helen's review of Johanna Hanink's The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017), has just been published in Reviews in History.
Just out: MACAT Analyses of 'Bloodlands' and 'The Hitler Myth'Helen's analyses of Ian Kershaw's The Hitler Myth and Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands have recently been published by Routledge in the Macat Library series of guides to classic works of scholarship.
"With a growing list of over 180 titles across a broad range of subject areas, Macat works with leading academics from the world’s top universities to produce new analysesRead more...