In fact, though now my memory is hazy and so I speculate more wildly, not even most kinds of employment grants copyright to the employer. Exceptions being software developers and teachers, I think.
Of course, because in germany you can not transfer your copyright at all, unless you die. ;)
Without being nitpicky you are still right in the way you meant it: There is no automatic usage right afaik. (And also google results agree: eg https://likvi.de/blog/urheberrecht )
You can however grant an unlimited, transferrable, exclusive license, which for all intents and purposes is like "transferring copyright".
Your nitpick isn't entirely irrelevant though. This is why Germany does not recognize public domain dedications and why CC0 is necessary.
(Though copy rights themselves might also be treated as actual rights, rather than a temporary monopoly, an exception to the normal state of everything being in the public domain that prevails in the common law countries ?)
The author appears to be Irish, but living in Germany.
For what it's worth, this often comes as a surprise even to many German creators who are not aware of this because intuitively if you get paid to create something "for" someone, you sell them your rights to it. But in reality that requires an explicit contract spelling this out. A typical example is professional photographers actually only selling you prints of the photos they take for you, or a design agency not giving you the source files for designs they create for you.