But I suspect it is a difference in attitude. I think in Scandinavia we are generally far more enthusiastic about new things.
Not only did the nazis use the resident register to find undesirables, but also the soviet union used any and all avenues to spy and control people.
Privacy and scepticism of making the sate a mandatory middleman is deeply entrenched for historic reasons.
Specifically this cryptographically tight identification, electronic-only payment etc. are very contentious for this reason I believe.
But overall your point is still correct, there is a strong bias towards the status quo and the new thing has a lot of proving itself to do before being accepted.
Size of a country has nothing to do with this. Neighbouring Austria is tiny and is also federalized, with each state having several degrees of autonomy and potentially causing various bureocratic nightmares depending on what you want to do.
Same with Switzerland and its cantons.
Germany has seen two dictatorships in the last century. The first one was more brutal, but the second one maintained a gigantic spying apparatus on its citizens, that took a large fraction of the state's budget.
If you contrast it with the US, you'll find some technologies earlier in use in Germany, like texting, and some stuff that just went different (credit vs. debit cards). And talk to someone from the US or even the UK about mandatory ID cards, and you'll hear different things about privacy.
I think this specifically is mostly to blame on bureaucracy and the federal system, not a reflection of general German luddism. Nobody really wants fax machines.
Source: https://www.wondriumdaily.com/germanys-surveillance-system-i...