The insane thing about this is that certain German[0] economists have always been very vocal about these things -- both the implications of the trade deficit, particularly within the Euro zone, and the wage dumping or wage restraint as it's commonly referred to here.
These were fairly prominent figures and all of this has been part of the local nationwide political dialogue years before there was any debt/banking/Euro crisis. Nothing happened.
[0] And others, everywhere, I'm sure, but I'm making a statement about Germany here.
There is an argument that the fixed and, more importantly, uniform interest rate across the entire zone caused problems.
I personally find the argument even more convincing that it's a wage structure problem. If you look at unit labor costs (essentially wages divided by productivity), then it becomes painfully obvious that Germany has been doing significant wage dumping - their unit labor costs have remained flat, violating the 2% inflation goal.
This caused the trade imbalances that are at the root of the current mess.