Author: Helen Roche

Presented to the Pförtner Bund (Schulpforta Old Boys' Association) at their annual autumn reunion, Hotel Albrechtshof, Berlin, 10 November 2017.Read more...

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, the Third Reich's most prominent elite schools, as a case study of the manifold ways in which elements of a bourgeois habitus were cultivated during the Third Reich, despite the Nazi movement's claims to embody socialist principles. Given sufficient time, the Napolas could well have become instrumental in consolidating a new, National Socialist caste structure.Read more...

Helen's review of Wilhelm Müller und der Philhellenismus, edited by Marco Hillemann and Tobias Roth (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2015), has recently appeared in German Quarterly.Read more...

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...

Brill's Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, edited by Helen Roche and Kyriakos Demetriou, has just been published by Brill.

The volume provides the first ever guide to the manifold uses and reinterpretations of the classical tradition in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. The essays contained within explore how political propaganda manipulated and reinvented the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome in order to create consensus and historical legitimation for the Fascist and National Socialist dictatorships.Read more...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...