Author: Helen Roche

A monograph based on Helen's doctoral research, entitled Sparta's German Children: The ideal of ancient Sparta in the Royal Prussian Cadet-Corps, 1818-1920, and in National Socialist elite schools (the Napolas), 1933-1945, has just been published by the Classical Press of Wales.

"From the eighteenth century until 1945, German children were taught to model themselves on the young of an Ancient Greek city-state: Sparta..."Read more...

On 13 February 2013, Helen presented a paper entitled '"Neither Political nor National Socialist": Former Nazi elite-school pupils' conflicts with their contested pasts' at an international conference on Memories of Conflict, Conflicts of Memory, which was held at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London.Read more...

Presented at an international conference on 'Memories of Conflict, Conflicts of Memory', Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, 13 February 2013.Read more...

Helen's article, '"In Sparta fühlte ich mich wie in einer deutschen Stadt" (Goebbels): The Leaders of the Third Reich and the Spartan Nationalist paradigm' has just been published in a volume entitled English and German Nationalist and Antisemitic Discourse, 1871-1945, edited by Felicity Rash, Geraldine Horan and Daniel Wildmann.

The article is based on a paper presented at an eponyomous conference which took place at Queen Mary, University of London, in November 2010.Read more...

Review essay, published in the International Journal of Play 5 (3), 2016 (special issue on Histories of Play, edited by Kate Darian-Smith and Simon Sleight), pp. 343-345.Featuring George Eisen's Children and Play in the Holocaust: Games Among the Shadows (1988); Nicholas Stargardt's Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (2006); Heidi Rosenbaum's “Und trotzdem war’s ’ne schöne Zeit”: Kinderalltag im Nationalsozialismus (2014), and Bastian Fleermann and Benedikt Mauer (eds) Kriegskinder: Kriegskindheiten in Düsseldorf 1939–1945 (2015).Read more...

On 15 December 2012, Helen co-organised a colloquium on 'German Philhellenism' at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge. The proceedings of the event have since been published in the journal Publications of the English Goethe Society.Read more...

Presented at the Classical Reception Discussion Group Colloquium on German Philhellenism, University of Cambridge, 15 December 2012.Read more...

On 8 December 2012, Helen presented a paper entitled '"Recreating a shared Graeco-German Aryan heritage": The ideal of Greek education for citizenship in National Socialist pedagogy' at the Legacy of Greek Political Thought Workshop, University of Bristol.Read more...

Swansea (Classical Press of Wales), 2013.
From the eighteenth century until 1945, German children were taught to model themselves on the young of an Ancient Greek city-state: Sparta. From older children, from teachers in the classroom, and from higher authority first in Prussia, then in Imperial and National Socialist Germany, came images of Sparta designed to inculcate ideals of endurance, discipline and of military self-sacrifice. In treating the final period of this process, the author has collected testimony from numerous surviving German witnesses who attended the Napolas as children in the early 1940s. Read more...

edited by Helen Roche and Kyriakos Demetriou; Leiden (Brill), 2018.
Intended for a wide readership, this volume offers the first ever comprehensive guide to the manifold uses and reinterpretations of the classical tradition in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. The essays within the collection explore the ways in which the classical past was constantly recreated to fit Nazi and Fascist ideology. Political propaganda manipulated the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome in order to create consensus and historical legitimation for the Fascist and National Socialist dictatorships.Read more...