Hi Stoaf, I am dealing with the same issue. From my point of view, it's a completely different story to rank a domain in Google.com and in a local Google. Honestly, most of the things that work in .com when we speak about backlinking wont work for you in Google.de . The reason is simple - google.de will not index most of the sites you will incorporate into your backlinking strategy. It's not "set up" that way.
And, you can hardly focus on German Web 2.0, German Article directories, etc., as there are very little amount of these - so the power they'll provide will be quite low...
I believe that the best you can do here is the following: Try to make the domain with as many websites as you only can. That means, if you can somehow (we are on BH forum) make it with 1000s of inner sites, do it. I see from my own experiments that these domains having so many inner websites rank particularly well in local Googles.
Other thing I would advice is to make the registration in local directories (.de). I know some people here will say it sucks, but however, in local googles it's not the worst strategy.
I can write some more other basic things, but I am sure you know about those. Good luck m8 anyway!
