Where did you get that opinion? Germany is not doing great but OK in the group of Western countries, and its car industry is both very imporant and in trouble, so it's not an unreasonable opinion that things would be better without that trouble.

Germany has a great layer of "consultants" that fudge the books and make everything look profitable and rosy. It's the land of "Arbeitsgruppen" and "Berater" - folks that ensure things get buried and forgotten.

But there is no investment in the future, no investment in infrastructure and no investment in anything creative, in fact, that's were cuts are made, in the arts and culture.

Once a society can no longer afford the arts, you know there is something going wrong and Germany is going wrong. Perhaps "klagen auf hohem Niveau" (complaining from up on high) but the higher they are, the further they fall.

It's not. It's more like a cancer patient with an Überweisung for their first cancer screening but dragging their feet to go and do it. They know is it bad and will get worse but they're afraid of facing it.