Work

Invited paper, presented at the Modern German History Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, 7 February 2018.Read more...

Presented to the Pförtner Bund (Schulpforta Old Boys' Association) at their annual autumn reunion, Hotel Albrechtshof, Berlin, 10 November 2017.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...

in Brill's Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, ed. Helen Roche, Kyriakos Demetriou, Leiden (Brill) 2018, pp. 3-28.

This introduction to Brill's Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany sets the other contributions to the volume in context.

The ideas in this introduction have been more fully explored in a recent article in Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies.Read more...

in The Persistence of Race: Continuity and Change in Germany from the Wilhelmine Empire to National Socialism, ed. Lara Day, Oliver Haag, Oxford (Berghahn) 2017, pp. 65-86.

At the turn of the 20th century, the idea that the destinies of races, nations and empires were universal and biologically determined (whenever in human history they existed) was the preserve of a minority of racial theorists and academics. However, within a few decades, such ideas came to dominate National Socialist thought, and were propagated in ideological and educational material throughout the Third Reich.Read more...

Presented at 'The Making of the Humanities VI', the sixth annual conference of the Society for the History of the Humanities, Somerville College, University of Oxford, 29 September 2017.Read more...

On 24 October 2016, Helen gave a public lecture at Nordhausen's Museum Tabakspeicher, entitled 'Napola Ilfeld and other Nazi Elite Schools in Central Germany', organised by Town Archivist Dr. Wolfram Theilemann, in conjunction with the Nordhausen Society for History and Antiquity. The lecture also attracted attention in the local media.Read more...

Invited paper, presented at an expert workshop entitled 'Die Klosterkammer Hannover im Nationalsozialismus', Institut für Didaktik der Demokratie, Leibniz Universität Hannover, 15 June 2017.Read more...