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): https://cucd.blogs.sas.ac.uk/files/2019/02/MAC-SWEENEY-ET-AL-Claiming-the-Classical.pdf

Jan Nelis, ‘Back to the Future: Italian Fascist Representations of the Roman Past', Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies 3.1 (2014), 1-19: https://brill.com/view/journals/fasc/3/1/article-p1_1.xml?language=en

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), pp. 127-52: https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-00802004

Paywalled

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

Stephen Hodkinson and 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’, pp. 253-314

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

Han Lamers and 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 Sparta: Beyond the Mirage, ed. Stephen Hodkinson and Anton Powell (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2002), pp. 323-49

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.