The Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People: by Steven E. Ozment.

I remember reading a statistic quoted by a British persona to the effect that the French had twenty million problems - this was before the second world war, French population was sixty million and Germans were eighty million in number, so the accounting was easy enough.
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Land of fairy tales, so much so there is a scenic route specially designated so. And the forest creatures, the fairy tale characters, all come out between November and February, the time when theoretically Halloween is celebrated what with darkness of winter descending and spirits, creatures, demons coming out - official celebration is usually in February, a day variable through the country and fixed conveniently by every town independently. But through the four month dark period the creatures and spirits are visible in car toys, stickers, home decorations and various other manifestations.

The fairy tales were probably ancient legends from history before recording, now designated a lower position of children's stories or myths, but such power as they hold does not belong to the realm of imagination alone. Mickey Mouse is much loved in US but foxes in German, Rapunzel and so on, have a different power. Pigs dominate the place with appearances as toys, stickers, candy or other fun food forms. Germany might have been told to forget her pre Roman Gods, but forgetting lesser creatures was not imposed on the land and if it was it did not succeed at all.
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The language teacher assigned us in Germany explained, or at least attempted to explain, the fear of strangers Germans seemed to pathologically have at a very primitive level in various ways.

This fear is experienced by various outsiders and quite a lot of born and brought up citizens who never lived anywhere else, too, when for example they are of Turkish ancestry. Commonly "no foreigners wanted" goes with half of advertisements openly enough in print along with houses or apartments for rent, roughly; the other half merely do not put it in print, but seldom are comfortable; and German friends are friends in US or other countries but not in Germany. And so forth.

This language teacher tried to claim it was because Germany never had an empire like the French and the British, but she knew this was untrue, Germany did have a definite presence in Africa before wwi. Then she talked of African-American US soldiers molesting German girls post wwii, and this we refuted vigorously, we could not imagine US military allowing this to happen in any way. Fact is German women were kept for use of German military in facilities and only women of Bangladesh before independence used by Pakistan military were in worse condition than the German young women kept for use of German military and other paramilitary males. This was apart from the young women used to breed a superior race by keeping them in a facility and breeding them with select high level nazis.

She of course knew all of this and could not be too certain we did not - we did, but did not think of throwing it back at her, it was far too unpleasant. So she came up with another reason.

It went back to the ancient history of Mongolian hordes attacking with Attila the Hun, she said, who were successful in Europe until the Germans fought back (how far they came into Germany is a good question, since the British refer to German as the Huns, and whether it is related to some racial remnant or merely a set of traits, some definitive characteristics shared, is anybody's guess) - which remained in German subconscious, she said.

"Germans had never seen horses before, and they were terrified" was her final explanation.