Between myth and abuse – ‚Germanic‘ narratives as a battleground for ideological appropriation

The lecture by Nadine Popst and Angila Vetter, which is part of the research training group „Wissen – Glauben – Behaupten. Wahrheitsproduktion und Wahrheitsdurchsetzung in der Vormoderne“ at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, examines the ideological appropriation of ‚Germanic‘ narrative material from the 19th century to neo-right-wing contexts. It analyses how medieval texts are transformed into closed, identitarian systems of meaning while erasing their ambivalence. In addition to well-known examples such as the Song of the Nibelungs, the focus is also on less prominent texts whose political instrumentalisation is often concealed, but no less effective.

Nadine Popst has been working since 2020 as academic coordinator and team leader at „Der Österreichische Bibelübersetzer. Gottes Wort Deutsch“ (project leaders: Jens Haustein, Freimut Löser, Martin Schubert), funded by the Academic Union at the University of Augsburg. She studied German Medieval Studies, Philosophy and Modern German Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and completed her doctorate in 2014 with the dissertation „De Ira Herois: Zorn in Sprache und Literatur des 9. bis 13. Jahrhunderts, unter Berücksichtigung des philosophisch-theologischen Diskurses“. Nadine Popst combines philological work with the possibilities of modern data processing. In addition to the language and literature of the early Middle Ages, the relationship between religious literature and epic poetry as well as practical philosophy in history and contemporary politics, her research focuses on new developments in the digital humanities.

Angila Vetter is a research associate at the Institute for German Studies at the University of Hamburg. Her research focuses on edition philology, digital humanities and the materiality and mediality of literary texts from the High and Late Middle Ages. She studied German philology and art history and completed her doctorate with a thesis on retextualisation strategies in medieval composite manuscripts. She is currently coordinating the DFG long-term project „Willehalm in Context – Digital Edition of Willehalm and its Supplementary Poems“.

An event organised by the Research Training Group „Knowledge – Belief – Assertion“ in cooperation with the Fritz Bauer Forum