I was surprised the article didn't mention the euro, specifically how Germany gets to denominate its goods in a cheap currency that doesn't fully reflect its strong fiscal policies.
It's one of the major problems with the Euro... It was a terrible idea from the start, and situations like Greece were foreseen by economists like the great Wynne Godley decades ago (see Maastricht and All That, London Review of Books, Oct 1992). Unfortunately the mainstream of economics still doesn't have a developed enough understanding of monetary systems to have worked that out yet...
The Euro policy is not German monetary policy. Germany has always asked for a harder currency policy.
Germany also had a huge trade surplus long before the Euro. The economic numbers were going down after a the reunification and its problems (collapse of the East German economy). Germany is now back to the same success West Germany had before the reunification. Now with a larger market (the EU integration now is deeper and with more countries), simplified exports to the larger market (mostly) with a common currency, a much better access to east Europe as an emerging market, ...
As for the other countries, all they can do is cut down importing I guess?