Articles

The Historical Journal 66 (2), 2023, pp. 413-34.

This article draws attention to education as a previously under-researched category of intervention in the history of modern biopolitics. The two case-studies cover both extremes of the spectrum of biological selection in education, from the negative, eugenic policies applied to supposedly ‘abnormal’ pupils at the so-called ‘special schools’ (Hilfsschulen), to the ‘positive’ biological selection of elite-school applicants at the National Political Education Institutes.Read more...

in The Palgrave Handbook of Testimony and Culture, ed. Sara Jones, Roger Woods, Basingstoke (Palgrave Macmillan), 2023, pp. 65-90 (co-written with Achim Saupe).

This chapter gives an overview of the ways in which testimony has been used by historians, and the ways in which it has influenced the development of new historiographical methods. Above all, the authors explore the different contextual frameworks within which testimonies have developed—legal, moral, and practical. What makes a testimony ‘true’ or ‘trustworthy’ in the eyes of the observer?Read more...

in Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Daniel Gerster, Felicity Jenz, Basingstoke (Palgrave Macmillan), 2022, pp. 79-100.

This article uses the elite education provided by the Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten (Napolas) as a case study of the Nazi regime’s drive to eradicate class-based social differences. Nazi propaganda claimed that the Napolas embodied the most ‘socialist’ elements of National Socialism, and that they were instrumental in realising the Nazi ideal of the Volksgemeinschaft.Read more...

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...

Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, 8 (2), 2019, pp. 127-52.

While it is generally acknowledged that fascist movements tend to glorify the national past of the country in which they arise, sometimes, fascist regimes seek to resurrect a past even more ancient, and more glorious still; the turn towards ancient Greece and Rome. This phenomenon is particularly marked in the case of the two most powerful and indisputably ‘fascist’ regimes of all: Benito Mussolini’s Italy and Adolf Hitler’s Germany.Read more...

in Die Klosterkammer Hannover 1931-1955: Eine Mittelbehörde zwischen wirtschaftlicher Rationalität und Politisierung, ed. Detlef Schmiechen Ackermann et al., Göttingen (Wallstein), 2018, pp. 605-26.

This chapter delineates the history of the Klosterschule in Ilfeld, and its transformation into a Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt (Napola). The Klosterkammer Hannover's role in the running of the school and its support of the Napola after 1935 is explored, as well as its involvement with other putative Napola foundation projects.Read more...

The Historical Journal 61 (2), 2018, pp. 541-60.

Studies of German philhellenism have often focused upon the idealization of Greece by German intellectuals, rather than the political relationship which existed between contemporary Germans and the Greek state from the Greek War of Independence onwards. This review essay explores the extent to which recent research affirms or rebuts the notion of a Hellenophile Sonderweg when interpreting the vicissitudes of the Graeco–German relationship.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...

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...

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...