Recent figures raise fears that the power house of the European economy could be tipping into recession.
On Friday, we learned that industrial production in February - excluding energy and construction - had fallen.
The previous day, new official data showed that manufacturing orders also declined in the same month.
At the start of the week, another survey of the same sector reported new orders and export sales "falling at rates not seen since the global financial crisis".
We look at what's gone wrong for the German industrial machine.