Author: Helen Roche

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...

Potsdam: Brandenburgische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2025.

This richly-illustrated companion volume to an exhibition on the Napola in Potsdam (current site of the Brandenburg Federal State Government) places this specific Nazi elite school's history within the broader context of Nazi society. The volume tells the stories of staff and pupils, charting the ways in which they navigated the National Socialist regime, whilst also illuminating the school's daily life and institutional structure.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...

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...