While during the financial crisis both moral suasion and search for yield have been cited as factors explaining high and even increasing sovereign exposures of banks in euro area countries strongly affected by the crisis, we analyse whether search-for-yield strategies played a role in investments in risky sovereign bonds in the absence of moral suasion. To this end, our study focuses on the investment patterns of German banks. Besides, we address the extent to which their investment depended on central bank funding, government support, capitalisation and securities trading activities. For the large German banks under review, a key result is that, during the crisis period, publicly supported banks (bailed-out banks) did not engage in risky yield-seeking strategies, but instead divested from risky assets, including sovereign bonds from vulnerable countries in the euro area. This supports our hypothesis of a regulation- and reputation-induced de-risking strategy. In some ways, this behaviour contrasts with the moral suasion motive of publicly supported banks in the vulnerable countries.