German here as well. In general, I share your pessimism.
One thing to point out about VW is that their CEO, Herbert Diess, seems to get it. To name two anecdotal pieces of evidence, Elon had asked him to become CEO of Tesla back in 2015 [1] and he had conversations with Chinese battery supplier CATL about car batteries as far back as ten years ago [2].
I don't know... This year I lost all hope for Germany's future. This goes beyond VW. Until now, I kinda thought everything is going to be alright, Germany is a rich country and all. I wasn't aware of the extend of moral corruption in the CDU. They really eroded the whole country for personal gains. I've never been this disappointed and disillusioned by politics and society as I am for the last few month.
True, hopefully that'll motivate the CDU to clean up their act / code of conduct.
On the bright side, two of the leading companies in the mRNA vaccine space are based in Germany (BioNTech and CureVac), so there is still some ability to innovate.