Author: Helen Roche

Guest-edited special issue of Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, December 2019.

Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, along with other twentieth-century authoritarian regimes, have often attempted to create consensus through propagandistic reinterpretations of the classical past. Once Fascism and Nazism had fallen, the material legacies of both regimes then became the object of destruction, reinterpretation and memory work. This special issue stems from an interdisciplinary workshop held in 2018.Read more...

Guest-edited Special Issue of Publications of the English Goethe Society, October 2013.

Inspired by the proceedings of a colloquium on ‘German Philhellenism’ held at Cambridge University in 2012, this volume includes: 'Visions of Philhellenism in the Poetry of Wilhelm von Humboldt: Between historical analysis and idealized modernity' (Felix Saure); '"Life in the Whole": Goethe and English Aestheticism' (Stefano-Maria Evangelista), and '"Anti-Enlightenment": National Socialist educators’ troubled relationship with humanism and the philhellenist tradition' (Helen Roche).Read more...

Presented at the Legacy of Greek Political Thought Network Workshop, University of Bristol, 8 December 2012.Read more...

in European Review of History / revue européenne d'histoire 20 (4), 2013, pp. 581-609.

This article explores the tensions which arose when Schulpforta, Germany’s most renowned humanistic boarding-school, was forcibly turned into a Nazi elite-school (a Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt, or Napola). The time-honoured traditions of Christianity and enlightened humanism previously cultivated at the erstwhile Landesschule zur Pforta (alma mater of Fichte, Ranke and Nietzsche) were swiftly subordinated to the demands of national-socialist ideology.Read more...

On 20 November 2012, Helen gave a talk on her current research to the Fitzwilliam History Society, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.Read more...

in Publications of the English Goethe Society 82 (3), 2013, pp. 193-207.

This article examines some of the ways in which scholars and educators under National Socialism attempted to construct a model of philhellenism for the ‘Thousand Year Reich’ which explicitly defined itself as descended from, yet opposed to, earlier manifestations of the phenomenon, especially as personified by Enlightenment figures such as Winckelmann and Goethe. They also proclaimed a return to the true, ‘living’ spirit of the original Greek gymnasion.Read more...

Helen's article, '"Go, tell the Prussians...": The Spartan paradigm in Prussian military thought during the long nineteenth century', has just been published in New Voices in Classical Reception Studies e-journal.

You can view the article in its entirety here.Read more...

in English and German Nationalist and Antisemitic Discourse, 1871-1945, ed. Felicity Rash, Geraldine Horan, Daniel Wildmann, Oxford (Peter Lang) 2013, pp. 91-115.

This article examines some of the ways in which many of the Third Reich's leading figures (including Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, Rust and Rosenberg) treated Sparta as the perfect paradigm of a racially-pure warrior-state, as well as claiming that, in a certain sense, the Reich was Sparta incarnate.Read more...

Helen’s article ‘"Spartanische Pimpfe": The Importance of Sparta in the Educational Ideology of the Adolf Hitler Schools’, in Sparta in Modern Thought, ed. Stephen Hodkinson, Ian Macgregor Morris (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales), has been acclaimed as a 'lucid analysis' by the Bryn Mawr Classical Review.Read more...

On 6 July 2012, Helen presented a paper entitled 'Xenophon and the Nazis, or: How to Read the Anabasis in the Third Reich, and other Classical classroom propaganda' at the 81st Anglo-American Conference of Historians, Institute of Historical Research, University of London.Read more...