Work

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...

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...

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...

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...

in Hindsight in Greek and Roman History, ed. Anton Powell, Swansea (Classical Press of Wales) 2013, pp. 91-112.

This article explores and analyses the ways in which historians, both modern and ancient, have applied hindsight to the Spartan empire of 404-371 B.C., and to its downfall. Many modern treatments of the period are even labelled as studies in Spartan failure, and thus betray a tendency to over-emphasise error and lack of foresight on the part of Sparta.Read more...

in Sparta in Modern Thought. Politics, History and Culture, ed. Stephen Hodkinson, Ian Macgregor Morris, Swansea (Classical Press of Wales) 2012, pp. 315-42.

This article explores the ways in which an ancient history textbook by the well-known archaeologist and educator Otto-Wilhelm von Vacano, entitled 'Sparta: The Life-Struggle of an Aryan Master Race', was used to encourage pupils at the Adolf Hitler Schools to identify with young Spartans, and to see Spartan history in proto-National Socialist terms.Read more...

An informal blog review considering the flaws in Jörg Muth's portrayal of the Prussian Cadet Corps in chapter 3 of his monograph Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901-1940, and the Consequences for World War II (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2011).Read more...