ABSTRACT
A more focused engagement with the Germanic peoples, their history and culture only really began in the German-speaking world in the late eighteenth century and then above all at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The modern concept of the German nation developed as a consequence of the Enlightenment, of the French Revolution and of the Napoleonic Wars, and of the decline of the preceding Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. The topic of Germanic history and culture, especially as part of the reception of national history and identity, can be primarily seen as a bourgeois-conservative concern at the beginning of the twentieth century. The reception and interpretation of Germanic culture and especially mythology was not by any means always viewed in a positive light under National Socialism and the Third Reich; it was rather regarded in a thoroughly ambivalent fashion. The use of archaic vocabulary can be considered a further form of reference to the Germanic peoples.
