I have always wondered at this.
Almost anything you look at, music, math, chemistry, physics, autos the trail invariably leads back to Germany.
Technology like Magnetic Tape Recording that took the world by storm
The Neumann / Telefunken microphone still revered after many decades
LCD - Bayer discovered liquid crystals in the 1930s but could not find any use for it at the time
Pri
Rocket Science that ultimately took us to the moon.
Electric Locomotives / Maglev ( France being the leader with the TGV ! )
Greatest Music ever written
Electron Microscope
Atomic research
The quality label that is assigned to products made in Germany by the rest of the world.
I am not saying that no other countries will come close nor is there any racial superiority implied.
There have been spectacular work done in Italy, France, Britain and the US .
We owe the www to Sir T B Lee 
The greatest technology of them all with due to respect to arpanet a pure american invention.
My curiosity is about the thought processes that drive these inventors and geniuses in their respective field and higher percentage of Germans in them.
Perceptions rather than hard evidence, perhaps (these are some commonplace thoughts in the UK, maybe influenced by what we don’t do, so much):
But I would suggest a deep cultural respect and collective support for education and training (particularly technical/craft skills valued as highly as academic/scholarly intellect), willingness to invest for the longer term and to nurture and support SMEs, and (for the most part) relatively powerful local/decentralised government.
The long history of Germany as a multiplicity of small polities/principalities may well have something to do with it: every local ruler had their own court and patronised both culture and trade/craft in an endless status competition with their neighbours. This may in turn have co-opted the local middle-classes who came to positions of power and influence as Germany industrialised, and carried forward the impetus for civic status competition.
While there are impressive inventions and technology coming out of the area we call Germany today, the idea of “Germany” as a nation is fairly new, really only coming into existence in the 1800s. There was great music being created in a lot of places. Technology requires some infrastructure, and once it arrives in some location there will be many advances until the other nations catch up.
Your perceptions are about a relatively short span of time. Technology begets technology and Germany is an advanced nation that has been on the cutting edge for a while. But it’s not unique in that regard.
I think contributing factors include government sponsorship/support of technology, a strong culture of education, and investment in industry.
Their education system values craftmanship and attention to detail. I worked with a German engineer and he told me started out as in apprenticeship at a young age and was required to build his own metal tool box from scratch as part if his completion before going on to college.
Been an engineer for 38 years now but I’d never have made that cut.
There’s a bit of exaggeration in your post along with maybe less of a recognition of what other countries have done. In many areas you listed out, Germany was not actually the world leader, and other countries have more significant accomplishments in those fields.
A lot of Germany’s “rise” happened as the Industrial Revolution hit–but note that in a great many cases, Germans were not the originators of many core aspects of the Industrial Revolution–British scientists and inventors were, Germans real excellence has tended to be in engineering more so than invention.
I have seen it suggested that a core reason for this is the history of, and high quality of, the German “vocational” education system, that synergized theory and practice. Many of the great thinkers in Britain for example were basically cloistered in the Academy, they would come up with ideas, and then usually less educated men who were “tinkerers” would build some of the first practical innovations based on their ideas. The British Academy was also significantly more “captured” by the British nobility and a system of patronage and unfair class advantage than was Germany’s, the German noble Junker class didn’t have the same level of influence over such aspects of society, and German institutions were more meritocratic.
There was a similar issue in France–which actually produced some of the foundational scientists of the 18th/17th century as well, for example Antoine Lavoisier in chemistry, not to mention figures like Descartes and Pascal in mathematics. There was no good system in France either that synergized the work that, essentially cloistered academics did, with more applied technologies.
So while Britain for example was clearly the most industrialized country in Europe in say, 1820, by 1880 Germany was the industrial titan of Europe and was widely understood to produce the best quality machines etc–this is because of engineering, the ability to take theoretical science and turn it into applied technology, that was the real difference, and I think the main reason was a more meritocratic educational system that was not so class stratified, and the vocational system that lead to students having more of a focus on not just principles and ideas but how to apply them.
It is funny you write that as I believe most Germans would not agree with you on that, so maybe what Germans do best is Eigenwerbung (self promotion). Who would have thought?
Let’s pretend you were right: Many answers have been given. I would insist on education and professional formation, the co-determination procedure to govern enterprises with tame and friendly trade unions, a civil servant tradition rooted in military discipline with low levels of corruption, a decent judicial system.
But you are not really right. Best music ever? Were you thinking of Beethoven? Mozart was not German. Haendel was born in Germany, but worked in London. Prokrofieff, Debussy, Verdi… That is just subjective.
Science? You mean Einstein? I say Newton and Galileo. And Lord Kelvin and Darwin. You want it more atomic? Enrico Fermi and Richard Feynman, Dirac, Niels Bohr (Dane! Not German!).
This could go on and on. I have the impression you confuse “being good at something” with “being successful at something”. German enterprises were very successful for a time in some fields, some of them very visible to consumers: mainly optics (you forgot hat one), precision mechanics, applied chemistry (applied to dyeing, poisons, explosives and the Haber-Bosch process, to be precise) and engineering. They are no longer that successful; they are still good, but more and more in niches.
You left out ShamWow.
Anecdotally, the visiting German engineers I’ve worked with tended to be arrogant, disinterested in industrial safety, and focused on impractical perfection: “perfect, but what do we do when this fitting breaks and the only replacement parts are in Dusseldorf?” “Oh, that’s only a problem because of your inferior American maintenance technicians.”
Music?
While Germany certainly had its share of famous composers back in the day, the “trail” leads back to the Italians, not to the Germans. Written music (at least Western music) uses symbology and terminology developed by the Italians during the Renaissance.
Your list is also very German-centric. While German culture does have a reputation for being heavily focused on engineering, there are many other things that German culture has a poor reputation with.
Hence the old joke:
In heaven:
Your cook is Italian.
Your mechanic is German.
Your policeman is English.
Your lover is French.
It is all organized by the Swiss.
In hell:
Your cook is English.
Your mechanic is French.
Your policeman is German.
Your lover is Swiss.
It is all organized by the Italians.
As for German engineering, while it has accomplished great things, there are also some valid criticisms of it. One of the commonly cited examples is the Tiger tank of WWII. This was a huge over-engineered beast of a machine, and by just about every measure it was by far the best tank of the war. It had a hugely powerful gun that could shoot through the armor of just about any other tank on the battlefield. It had thick armor that our Sherman tanks couldn’t even penetrate head-on. It took on average four Shermans to take out a single Tiger, and then only because eventually one of the Shermans would manage to maneuver around behind it and shoot it in the ass where the armor was thinnest. The Russian T34 fared a bit better against the Tiger than the Sherman did, but even the Russians had trouble against that big gun and heavy armor. And the Germans would have been much better off if they had never produced it. That may seem kind of a strange thing to say, but because the Tiger was such a complex over-engineered marvel, it took a huge amount of resources to produce it. We could produce 10 Shermans for the same amount of effort as it took the Germans to produce 1 Tiger. In the end, the “superior” Tiger proved to be completely inferior on the battlefield because they couldn’t produce enough of them to be significant.
That kind of summarizes German engineering during the two world wars, great stuff but a huge waste of resources. This applied to everything from tanks to rifles and just about every other weapon type. They would have often been much better off producing inferior stuff in much greater quantities. That was how the Russians beat the Germans on the Eastern Front.
Being hyper-focused on good engineering isn’t always a good thing.
This. We’re so good at planning, administration and engineering that every construction project of a bigger scale takes about 10 years longer than the deadline for at least the double of the original budget:
Oh yes, that and Stuttgart 21 too 
And the Hauptbahnhof in Berlin, and the Kanzleramt, and and and…
What Germans Don’t Do:
In my limited experience with German cars, it seems to me that they go for the “best” solution, rather than the easiest to service, pretty much every time.
I mean, changing a daytime running light ought to be a trivial task. But on my wife’s 2012 Passat, to do so requires opening a hatch in the wheel well that you can’t get to without turning the wheel all the way to one side. Then, you have to reach into that hatch, and turn another little hatch/plug to get it loose. This thing is about 3" in diameter. Once that’s out of the way, you’re supposed to reach in, up, and in again in order to turn the bayonet mount plug holder to get the bulb out. All while reaching up 90 degrees through a 3" hole, and turning something in a direction perpendicular to it.
That’s hard enough, but I got that done. Putting it back in requires doing the same in reverse. The biggest problem is that you basically have to have small and extremely strong hands to do this- if your hands are large, or you don’t have tremendous hand strength, it’s going to be really difficult. I couldn’t manage it, and I’ve changed all sorts of bulbs on eight or nine US/Japanese cars over the years. They typically just require removing the housing and replacing bulbs.
But VW has to have this f**ked up hatch business to change a simple bulb. Maybe it’s best for what they were trying to accomplish, but it sure sucks for actually dealing with.
Same thing for their other maintenance tasks - a car built for the US market, and made IN the US (Chattanooga, TN in fact), requires all sorts of unusual European fluids that aren’t necessarily impossible to get, but that aren’t nearly as common as the standard US/Japanese/Korean car stuff that all the other cars use. Same for the Mercedes-Benz vehicles.
I’m sure their VW-spec oil is great stuff and beats the API/ILSAC oils, but is it really worth specifying that over the more commonplace stuff? I mean, perfect is the enemy of the good here.
Relevant BBC article I read some weeks ago:
That concert hall is really ugly.
And allegedly has crap acoustics.
Which is the main purpose of a concert hall. Really doesn’t matter how ugly it is from the outside if the acoustics are bad. But I vaguely remember that Carnegie Hall had bad acoustics after an earlier renovation but then some changes were made to improve things. So perhaps Hamburg might be able to improve the situation?
One notable strength of the German economy was was their technical vocational education system and the large number of middle sized companies, the Mittelstand, particularly in engineering.
German tool making is famous for its quality. Far better than the output of Far Eastern factories. But that comes at a premium. Such quality often costs 3 times as much.
Germans are quite as susceptable to overly ambitious and expensive engineering as any other country but they seem to have the basics of education and training in place. How that is directed, managed and used is another matter.
Could it be that not having the huge overhead of a large and very wasteful defence budget helped direct technical resources to civilian applications? That and having to basically build the country again from the rubble of WW2. You can do better second time around.
German culture also as a lot of social discipline. They tend to cut down tall poppies. It is a Protestant thing, I guess. They are good at organisation, stuff works. But this straight line thinking and does not encourage creativity and invention. These are necessary, particularly in a time of technological change such as we are going through now.
Germany is the fourth biggest arms exporter in the world. We don’t build much of them for ourselves, but we sure do sell ass-loads to the world.
Motorcycles. German motorcycles are excellent. IME, back in the 1980s when I started riding, this was a broad and general truth. While there were many good motorcycles available, the BMW motorcycles were generally the best. The reason?
Precision engineering.
The pieces fit together precisely. Accurately. Tight tolerances. It was generally known that while a Japanese bike was “old” at 10,000 miles, at 50,000 miles a BMW bike was just getting broken in.
There are exceptions, of course. And people will disagree.
My first motorcycle was a 1983 Yamaha 650 Special. I bought it new, then put 49,000 miles on it before selling it. Pretty good endurance, that bike. I bought my first BMW, a used 1983 with 80,000 miles, and I put another 60,000 miles on it. I’ve owned only BMWs since then.
Motorcycles have gotten much better since the 1980s. Many companies make excellent bikes now. Even back in the 1980s, smaller Japanese sport bikes were very good. And the Honda Gold Wing had established a solid reputation. But in general the BMWs were excellent.
That’s been my experience in 225,000 miles* and almost 40 years of riding, and as an MSF instructor. German excellence, yes.
- — 225,000 miles, with no accidents.
One aspect of this post-WW2 is the fact that (in common with Japan) the industrial base of Germany was utterly wiped out. Counterintuitively this actually was an advantage, as they had to start again from scratch with the latest techniques and equipment, unlike their competitors in the US and UK who had the physical (no one was going to tear down a factory and build it again from scratch) and organizational (“we won two world wars doing this way dammit!”) inertia to overcome to make any changes.
Another often, overlooked aspect, is the fact that Germany has a really strong system of organized labour, with union representatives being involved at all levels all the way up the to board.