The German people, as a people, started as the unification of the Germanic tribes. The unified tribe called itself the tribe of all men, Alle Männer in modern German. The history of those times is narrated by romans and Greeks so we have a romanised version of that name, alamanni.
When I was a kid our family went on vacation to the US. Everyone kept asking if I was Dutch, which I thought was German (Deutsch).
So I kept correcting them, saying I was Netherlandish :)