Fewer and fewer people in Germany choose physics as their major at a university.
This is not just hearsay, but it is actually based on a statistical evaluation by the German Society of Physics (sorry, the document is in German only, but you can clearly see the trend in Fig. 1). Also, there are fewer people getting a B.Sc., M.Sc. and PhD degree.
Here are some thoughts on the issue whether physics -- in particular, condensed matter physics, because that is the very discipline I am working in -- has an image problem and why physics as a subject may be less appealing to people nowadays than it used to be some years and decades ago. Certainly, I do not have a simple solution for this problem, but perhaps some of the following points could be important factors in this context.