In 1983, when his book The World After Oil: The Shifting Axis of Power and Wealth was published (later translated into German as Das Ende unserer Zukunft), Bruce Nussbaum was a co-editor and writer at BusinessWeek. In the book’s third chapter, „The Decline of West Germany and the Dissolution of Europe,“ he sketches a picture of West Germany that is unusually sharp for an American business journalist of that era: a country whose prosperity rests on the leading industries of the nineteenth century — steel, chemicals, mechanical engineering — while in the United States and Japan the new leading industries are taking shape: semiconductors, biotechnology, computing. Nussbaum opens the chapter with a reference to the film Das Boot, which in 1982 became the most successful foreign-language film in the United States, and reads it as a symptom: a reawakening German nationalism was once again attaching itself to a story about technology — this time, however, a declining one (p. 91).

The case Nussbaum builds across the following chapters is not impressionistic but empirically grounded, and it resolves into three strands that, forty years later, reappear in strikingly similar form.

The Technology Gap

Nussbaum describes a West Germany that has ceded roughly 60 percent of its computer market to IBM, whose flagship company Siemens is falling behind Japanese manufacturers such as Fujitsu, and whose consumers — despite national pride in German design — are increasingly reaching for Japanese and American cars, cameras, and consumer electronics (p. 98f.). He locates the real cause not in individual management failures but in delayed modernization investment: Germany, he argues, made the leap to automation, robotics, and microelectronics later and more hesitantly than Japan, all while clinging to the postwar success built on precisely those industries that were now losing ground (p. 100f.).

More than four decades later, the same pattern can be observed in the semiconductor industry — only with the roles of the players reversed. The ESMC (European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, a joint venture of TSMC, Bosch, Infineon, and NXP) chip plant in Dresden is making progress: the topping-out ceremony took place in January 2026, equipment installation is underway in the second half of the year, and production is slated to start by the end of 2027. But the more than €10 billion facility deliberately focuses on mature 28/22- and 16/12-nanometer processes for automotive and industrial electronics — not on the leading-edge nodes where the most advanced chip generation is made. At the same time, Intel definitively canceled its planned plant in Magdeburg in July 2025; the previously pledged €9.9 billion in subsidies — the largest single subsidy in German history — was never paid out, because it was tied to actual construction progress. Four of the five major fab projects announced in Europe since 2022 have since been scrapped or paused, making the EU Chips Act’s goal of doubling Europe’s global market share from roughly 10 to 20 percent by 2030 look increasingly unrealistic. The pattern mirrors the one Nussbaum described: substance and capacity form where mature, already de-risked technology meets an existing industrial customer base — not at the technological frontier.

The Precision Trap

One explanatory thread that Nussbaum only gestures at can be named more precisely today. The culture of precision and perfection that is a genuine advantage in mechanical engineering — mature, nearly flawless products that perform reliably in the field for decades — becomes a liability in domains that call for speed and the capacity to iterate rather than hundred-percent accuracy. That is exactly the case for the software layer of the semiconductor industry: the market for chip-design software (Electronic Design Automation, or EDA — the tools used to design the circuitry of modern chips before they are ever manufactured) is dominated by an oligopoly in which the American vendors Cadence and Synopsys help design nearly every chip. The only European name of any consequence in this market, Siemens EDA, did not arise from an in-house venture but from Siemens’s 2017 acquisition of the American company Mentor Graphics.

The finding fits a broader pattern. Studies of digital growth culture at German …