The brothers place the loyalty to their friend above their obligations to their sister or to justice, leading to disaster and the complete destruction of the Nibelungs.
Addressing the Bosnian crisis, von Bülow invoked the absolute loyalty between the German Empire and Austria-Hungary to their Alliance of 1879 against the threat by the Entente cordiale:[1] The term is adopted by emperor Wilhelm II of Germany as the German Empire declared war alongside Austria-Hungary on 1 August 1914.
Used in this sense by Marxist commentators, the term describes a fanatical "Germanic" military loyalty associated with fascism and militarism.
[4] The term is also occasionally found in English-language literature about Nazi Germany; thus, Steinberg (1990) describes Goebbels' suicide as "a paroxysm of Nibelungentreue".
[5] Based on this association with fascism and militarism, the term has a derogatory or ironic connotation;[6] it describes any excessive or blind loyalty which in the speaker's opinion is bound to lead to disaster; it is frequently used in pro-Palestinian journalism denouncing the alliance between of USA or Germany with Israel,[7] or in contexts such as the American-British alliance leading to the ill-fated 2003 invasion of Iraq,[8] but it is also used (with an ironical connotation) in unpolitical contexts such as sports journalism.