The inside perspective from within Germany is different. Yes the Mittelstand is the backbone of our economy, but it is also the majority that thinks it is being f*cked over a lot by government decision which favor big companies with huge lobbying budgets. The Mittelstand carries the weight, but has little room and opportunity for shaping our society.
A lot of neocapitalistic concepts have been implemented during the last decade and have crippled our social security system and eroded workers rights. The dreaded subcontracted labour is on the rise. Welfare/social subsidy levels have been ruled inhumane by our courts. Our highest court has ruled that our voting system is against our contitution. Twice. What an embarrassment.
The dual education system mentioned in the article is indeed quite good. Apart from that our school and university education system does have serious flaws. In international comparison (PISA test) we are way apart from the best in class and nowhere else but in Germany does the quality of your education correlate as much with the income of your parents as it does here. More money, better education and vice versa.
The tight organization and structure praised in the article also does have its downsides. For example if you wanted to open a bicycle repair shop, you need to have a Zweiradmechanikermeister. (Meister = Master). So you need to be or employ someone who has been educated for several years as a bicycle repair mechanic. In a company that has a certificate for educating bicycle repair mechanics.
Yes, almost all of the space is managed. Over and over. Example: A club owner brought a ship, renovated it and made it into a bistro/bar/club boat. For the permission to use the ~20m of harbor space ranging from the ship to the nearby road he had to negotiate with four different parties. Just because there are abandoned rairoad tracs running across. Four different bureaucratic entities.
I am a hobbyist bee keeper. Which makes me sort of a registered farmer. With a farmer registration number and with registered bee stands. With insurance. With a local bee keeping society and the regional bee keeping society and the national bee keeping society I have to be member of (by proxy). If I want to sell some of the honey, I have to comply with nine different laws. For example I have to comply with a packaging law that tells my what and how I have to declare the honey on the label.
Despite a broad public consensus that genetically modified food should be labelled as such, lobbyists prevented just that. But. If my bees collect pollen from genetically modified plants, I can no longer sell that honey. So now I have to educate my bees to become certified honey collection masters and teach them the difference between unmodified and modified plants and teach them to only collect from the former. But the fathers of my bees died during sex and the queen despite her royal title does not have any money. No money, no education.
Lately my girlfriend and I have been camping at a lake in a different city. On a paid camping ground of course. No wild camping in Germany. With a barbed wire fence around it. It almost felt like a prison camp. At midnight my girlfriend and I made a warm summer night walk around the campsite, talking little and very quietly. Yet someone from inside a camper barked at us what the fuck we thought we were doing and that there has to be peace and quiet at ten. Period.
Our health care system is fundamentally broken. You don't get to see what the doctor bills to your insurance. But also your insurance does not get to see the bill. There is another layer of indirection in between called the Kassenärztliche Vereinigung which collects and anonymizes the doctors bills and sends collective bills to the insurances. You can imagine how easy it is to bill more than you worked for as a doctor. There is no control instance. In order to correct this, there are quarterly billing caps for doctors. Thus if you get sick in the middle of march, june, september or december, when the caps are hit, then either you don't get treated, or the doctor treats you without getting paid. A bad doctor will go on vacation four times a year, a good doctor will treat you on his own expense. I wish I were joking.
The city of Bremerhafen mentioned in the article ranges among the least favourite cities in Germany. Despite its interresting history only few people choose to live there. Sky high unemployment and an almost nonexistent social and cultural life. But hey, the article did not talk about how nice Bremerhafen is.
Anyway, I guess my perspective is one of the "its always greener on the other side" variety.
Germany is indeed a good place to live. I sometimes wish we would not try to be Weltmeister in everything so that we wouldn't have to solve Europes problems. (We still benefit from the european union, so keeping Europe tight and up and running benefits our own situation. So.)