Author: Helen Roche
Since its publication on 11 November 2021, Helen's book The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas has received widespread attention in the national and international media, including features in The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and interviews on the BBC, Scottish and Irish National Radio.Read more...
Helen has just been interviewed about her new book, The Third Reich's Elite Schools, by BBC Radio Scotland's 'Good Morning Scotland' programme, and by Sean Moncrieff on NewsTalk's "The Moncrieff Show".Read more...
Research Introduction, presented virtually at the NETWoRC seminar, Northumbria University, 3 November 2020.Read more...
'Eine Vergangenheit, die lieber vergessen wird? Scholarly Habitus-Forming, Professional Amnesia, and Postwar Engagement with Nazi Classical Scholarship'History of Humanities 5 (1), 2020 (special issue on "Forgetting in the History of the Humanities", ed. Han Lamers, Toon Van Hal), pp. 165-77.
This case study takes Volker Losemann’s recently published collection of essays, Clio und die Nationalsozialisten, and the (often far from complimentary) reception of his groundbreaking work on classics in the Third Reich since the 1970s, as a starting point to reflect on wider discourses that have led to academic “forgetting” of this period in German classical scholarship.Read more...
New Book: The Third Reich's Elite SchoolsHelen's second monograph, The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas, has now been published by Oxford University Press.
Helen's research draws on material from eighty archives in six different countries worldwide, as well as eyewitness testimonies from over 100 former pupils. The book, which has been over a decade in the making, presents the first comprehensive history of the Third Reich’s most prominent elite schools, the National Political Education Institutes (Napolas / NPEA).Read more...
Helen recently contributed a podcast on 'Classics in Nazi Germany' to a series of podcasts on Classics and decolonisation hosted by Khameleon Productions.Read more...
On 3 November 2021, Helen presented a brief research presentation on her third monograph project at the NETWoRC lunchtime research seminar.Read more...
On 20 October 2021, Helen presented a brief overview of her recently-published second monograph, The Third Reich’s Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas (OUP, 2021) to members of the History Department at Durham University.Read more...
Totalitarian Individualism? Berliners Under the Microscope from Weimar to the WallReview of Moritz Föllmer's in Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), published in the Book Reviews section of the Wiener Library Blog.
All too often, it is glibly assumed that the rise of individuality, the spirit of modernity, and the triumph of democracy must necessarily go hand in hand. Moritz Föllmer’s new monograph provides an important corrective to this frequently uninterrogated set of assumptions.Read more...
'An Uncompromising Generation' in a French Impressionist Key? Christian Ingrao's Anatomisation of "Intellectuals" in the SS War MachineReview of Christian Ingrao's Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), published in the Book Reviews section of the Wiener Library Blog.
In 2006, a publishing sensation erupted in France with the publication of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, a novel which sought to recreate the motivation and incremental brutalisation of an intelligent, educated SS officer, as he becomes ever more damningly implicated in the horrors of the Holocaust.Read more...