Classics in Nazi Germany, with Helen Roche

Abstract

In both Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, classical literature and history were appropriated to provide a mythic origin and justification for fascist politics. In this episode, Shivaike talks to Helen Roche, Associate Professor of Modern European Cultural History at Durham University, about the relationship between Classics, Fascism, and colonialism. Helen discusses her research, which explores the way that ancient Greek education was co-opted by Nazi Germany. Looking back to the eighteenth century and forward to modern Europe, Helen and Shivaike explore why notions of classical superiority and desirability have held such sway in right-wing states.

Bibliography

Open-source

Naoise Mac Sweeney et al, ‘Claiming the Classical: The Greco-Roman World in Contemporary Political Discourse’, Council of Classical Departments Bulletin 48 (2019)

Jan Nelis, ‘Back to the Future: Italian Fascist Representations of the Roman Past’, Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies 3.1 (2014), 1-19

Helen Roche, ‘Mussolini’s Third Rome, Hitler’s Third Reich and the Allure of Antiquity: Classicizing Chronopolitics as a Remedy for Unstable National Identity?’, Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies 8.2 (2019), 127-52

Helen Roche, ‘“Go, tell the Prussians…”: The Spartan Paradigm in Prussian Military Thought during the Long Nineteenth Century’, New Voices in Classical Reception Studies 7 (2012), 25-39

Paywalled

Joshua Arthurs, Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012)

Stephen Hodkinson & Ian Macgregor Morris (eds.), Sparta in Modern Thought: Politics, History and Culture (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2012)

• see especially Volker Losemann, ‘The Spartan Tradition in Germany, 1870-1945’, 253-314

Aristotle Kallis, The Third Rome, 1922-43: The Making of the Fascist Capital (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

Han Lamers & Bettina Reitz-Joosse, ‘Lingua Lictoria: The Latin Literature of Italian Fascism’, Classical Receptions Journal 8.2 (2016), 216-52

Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996)

Jan Nelis, ‘Constructing Fascist Identity: Benito Mussolini and the Myth of Romanità’, Classical World 100.4 (2007), 391-415

Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969)

Stefan Rebenich, ‘From Thermopylae to Stalingrad: The Myth of Leonidas in German Historiography’, in Stephen Hodkinson & Anton Powell (eds.), Sparta: Beyond the Mirage (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2002), 323-49

Helen Roche & Kyriakos Demetriou (eds.), Brill’s Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2018)

• see especially Helen Roche, ‘Classics and Education in the Third Reich: Die Alten Sprachen and the Nazification of Latin- and Greek-teaching in Secondary Schools’, 238-63

Helen Roche, Sparta’s German Children: The Ideal of Ancient Sparta in the Royal Prussian Cadet Corps, 1818-1920, and in National Socialist Elite Schools (the Napolas), 1933-1945 (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2013)

Helen Roche, ‘Eine Vergangenheit, die lieber vergessen wird? Scholarly Habitus-Forming, Professional Amnesia, and Postwar Engagement with Nazi Classical Scholarship’, History of Humanities 5.1 (2020), 165-77

Helen Roche, ‘“In Sparta fühlte ich mich wie in einer deutschen Stadt” (Goebbels): The Leaders of the Third Reich and the Spartan Nationalist Paradigm’, in Felicity Rash, Geraldine Horan & Daniel Wildmann (eds.), English and German Nationalist and Antisemitic Discourse (1871-1945) (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013), 91-115

Helen Roche, ‘“Spartanische Pimpfe”: The Importance of Sparta in the Educational Ideology of the Adolf Hitler Schools’, in Stephen Hodkinson & Ian Macgregor Morris (eds.), Sparta in Modern Thought: Politics, History and Culture (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2012), 315-42

Marla Stone, ‘A Flexible Rome: Fascism and the Cult of Romanità’, in Catharine Edwards (ed.), Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 205-20

Transcript

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.