ABSTRACT
This article covers only those myths that in the author's opinion relate to the continental Germans, and thus omits ones relating to the northern and western branches of this important group within the great Indo-European family. The first person to conceive of these heterogeneous peoples as Germanic was probably Tacitus. The second generally accepted manifestation of the Germanic myth is to some extent indirectly linked to the first, through its emphasis on efficiency and method. They point out the achievements of German industry, particularly in the fields of mechanical engineering and physics, which seem especially impressive in the present technocratic era. To revert one last time to the subject of language, it is perhaps because of the very organization of a German sentence, which permits every kind of digression before one finally reaches the verb at the end, that German writing has a certain mystique.
