86% of German companies employ 10 or fewer people [1]. I'm not why we would expect them to use online collaboration tools or video conferencing pre-pandemic?

Fax still being common is true though, it's mostly used as a quicker alternative to mail with established legal standing and more convenient than rolling out electronic signature schemes. You can still live and work without a fax in Germany, you will just be sending more letters. I've never sent a fax or letter to a German cloud provider though (despite using several of them)

1: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1929/umfrage/...