Sparta's German Children: The ideal of ancient Sparta in the Royal Prussian Cadet-Corps, 1818-1920, and in National-Socialist elite schools (the Napol [Hardcover]

From the eighteenth century until 1945, German children were taught to model themselves on the young of an Ancient Greek city-state: Sparta. From older children, from teachers in the classroom, and from higher authority first in Prussia, then in Imperial and National Socialist Germany, came images of Sparta designed to inculcate ideals of endurance, discipline and of military self-sacrifice. Identification with Sparta could also be used to justify ideas of domination over Germany's eastern neighbours. Helen Roche is the first to examine this still sensitive topic systematically and in depth. She collects and analyses official and published German evocations of Sparta but also, and remarkably, reconstructs the experiences of German children taught to be 'little Spartans' in the Prussian Cadet Corps and National Socialist elite schools, the Napolas. In treating the final, and gravest, period of this process, the author has personally collected testimony from numerous surviving German witnesses who attended the Napolas as children in the early 1940s. That testimony is presented here, in a work which is likely to proof definitive, not only for its treasury of new information, but for its elegant - and humane - analysis.1 General introduction: Sources and methodology
The philhellenist background 2 Personal and political appropriations of Sparta at the Prussian Cadet Corps: Historical context
'The Spartans of Lichterfelde'
Historical background: The aims and ethos of the Royal Prussian Cadet Corps 3 Spartanerjunglinge, or the importance of being Spartan: How to become a Spartan Youth
The endorsement of Spartanertum by Cadet-Corps authority figures 4 Creating the Cadet-Corps' Spartabild:Teaching, textbooks and the ancient sources
The Spartan trope and the ancient sources
Cadet-school textbooks as potential sources for the Spartan trope 5 Of Spartans and Socialisation: The function of 'spartanern'
The anatomy of the total institutiol“.