Now he is looking for a new home for his savings. “I have long thought about buying property in Berlin,” he says, pausing on the doorstep of the Berlin Savings Bank near the Friedrichstrasse train station. “Now I'm doing it. I will put everything I have, including money parked in Austria, into this.”

He is not alone. Anecdotal evidence shows chancellor Angela Merkel's surprise statement this week that all savings are safe was a wake-up call for a country that had treated the global financial crisis as a remote threat on a par with climate change or jihadist terrorism.

“All hell is breaking loose here,” says the lady at the savings bank's telephone hotline. “Since Monday, it's been an uninterrupted flood of calls.”