I heard someone call Germany the "California of Europe" for this reason. It's simultaneously full of high-tech and engineers yet paradoxically also full of alternative-medicine quackery and anti-science viewpoints on things like nuclear power.

AFAIK there's a weird through-line here where California new age and 70s "new left" ideology has some of its roots in the same early 20th century romanticism that was and I'm sure in various forms still is popular in Germany. Look up the Volkisch movement:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Völkisch_movement