The Germanic Will to Freedom Shaped the Modern World
Jan de Vries' book The Spiritual World of the Germanic Peoples (1964)
The 1964 book by Dutch germanologist Jan de Vries The Spiritual World of the Germanic Peoples (not available in English yet, but for sale in German here) may well be the best psychoanalysis of the Germanic man. In six chapters following a basic outline of the book, De Vries captures the Germanic ideals of honor, freedom, the law, the self, artform, and magic.
The Germanic peoples were strong personalities, wrote De Vries, not despite their boundness to an all-obligating totality, but precisely through this binding. The book comes in a red leather binding, and I realized the red skin is a reference to the Rauðskinna, a lost Icelandic book of magic also called the Book of Power. De Vries being his day’s top scholar on Old Norse literature would have undoubtedly know about it.
