Some fear the protectionist policies that Trump has threatened -- he has repeatedly calling the word tariff "music to my ears" -- could reduce German GDP by one percent and cost 300,000 jobs.
Here is a look at why the US market matters so much to Germany and what's at stake.
Key export market
For almost a decade, the United States, the world's biggest economy, has been the number-one destination for German exports.
Germany sent €158 billion ($163 billion) worth of goods to the United States -- equivalent to 10 percent of its total exports -- in 2023, the last full year for which data is available.
The huge volume resulted in an export surplus that was itself singularly large. Germany's exports were worth €63 billion more than the goods it imported from the United States.
"The importance of the United States for Germany's export economy is currently greater than ever in the last 20 years," said the federal statistics agency Destatis.
Germany's strong trading relationship with the United States has however already drawn the ire of Trump and left it particularly exposed to his threat to impose tariffs on key trading partners.
READ ALSO: What would a second Trump presidency mean for Germany?
In 2017 during his first term in office, Trump said Germany's trade surplus with the United States was "very, very bad", a theme he returned to on the campaign trail last year.
"They don't take anything," he fumed at one event. "But they give us their Mercedes, their BMWs, their Volkswagens."
Cars and chemicals at risk
Germany's flagship auto industry depends particularly heavily on consumers in the United States, their second-largest export market after China.
In 2023, 12.6 percent of cars and auto parts shipped from Germany ended up in the United States, according to Destatis.
The share is even higher for the chemicals sector, around a quarter of whose exports were shipped across the Atlantic.
The IfW Kiel economic institute said the stakes are high, warning that Trump's return to the White House is the "most economically difficult moment" in post-war Germany's history.
READ ALSO: German industry pessimistic over 2025 employment prospects
Tariff impact
Policy analysts have been working overtime to calculate the potential impact on the German economy if Trump were to make good on his threat to slap a 20 percent tariff on goods from the European Union.
German exports to the United States could fall by some 15 percent, the Munich-based Ifo institute estimated.
Economists at the IW Köln think tank reckoned with €130-180 billion of lost growth over the four years of Trump's second term if import taxes were raised.
All in all, Trump's economic policies could cost Germany one percent of GDP, the head of the German central bank, Joachim Nagel, warned at the end of last year.
Some 1.2 million jobs in Germany were dependent on exports to the United States and 300,000 could be lost if major tariffs were imposed, according to a study carried out by the Prognos think tank cited in the Süddeutsche Zeitung daily.
READ ALSO: How Trump’s tariffs could hit companies in Germany hard
Off-shoring
If higher tariffs make German goods more expensive and therefore less competitive in the United States, then one solution for company managers would be to shift production across the Atlantic.
"Companies will react and produce even more locally," said Achim Wambach, head of the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW).
To access the US market and avoid extra charges, businesses would have more incentives to invest directly in the United States instead of shipping goods from abroad.
"Private investment in Germany is likely to continue to fall, which could accelerate deindustrialisation," said Marcel Fratzscher, president of the DIW economic institute.
Many German businesses however already have a significant American footprint, not least the auto industry, which employs some 138,000 people at factories across the United States.
By Sophie Makris
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