Bickert, Neale G.2012-05-022012-05-0220122012-05-02http://hdl.handle.net/1828/3970Over eight hundred years ago anonymous poets set the orally transmitted Nibelungen myth to parchment. This action started a trend of adapting the myth for contemporary audiences, a trend that has lasted since the High Middle Ages. Since then, the Nibelungen myth has become a sustaining element of the self-mythologization of German national identity. The problem, however, with adapting the Nibelungen myth for the purpose of creating a German identity, be it in the medieval epic, the Nibelungenlied, or Fritz Lang's 1924 film, Die Nibelungen, is that this model of identification is flawed – flawed because it consists of systematic binary divisions positing self-other dichotomies. What becomes evident is that in the adaptations of Nibelungen myth, the representations of alterity are contradictory and ambiguous, provoking the question: why is the Nibelungen myth an effective source from which one can project a national identity?enNibelungenliedFritz LangOrientalismGenderOthernessAlterityMiddle AgesNationalismNibelungenWeimarhöfischmythnational identityambiguityThesisAvailable to the World Wide Web