When doing my taxes, I've asked if I could send some required documents of my deceased father via email, and the lady _didn't even know if she had an external facing email address_. I was just to send it to info@, tell them to print it and put it on her desk. She also didn't have a direct phone line, so I had to call the central office first and ask them to connect me to her.
My mom runs a small business there and luckily she's got fax-to-email and email-to-fax. Just because younger people use other means of communication now doesn't mean it's a myth. It's very much there, and other means very much aren't.
One can so easily set-up a company without it so. 90% of what you read about companies and how to run and set them up im Germany on HN is wrong.
Fortunately, these times are over, and the company has celebrated the long overdue abolition of the fax machine ;-)
I was flying back from munich to hamburg last week, with a passenger jet, which is produced in my hometown, with internet in the plane - not a fax.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/1626950/the-fax-is-sti...
Take this chart [0] from wikipedia [1]. Doesn't look too amazing. Now, being a gross exporter, the numbers are obviously skewed, but I didn't really mean EVs or electrical production specifically. German bureaucracy famously still runs on fax and emails are printed, there are lots of small-ish villages to small cities with _really_ bad internet connection among other things. It's a big country where politicians seem to be really afraid of change. It's not that the country is stuck in the 70s, but some things just take more time to arrive in Germany, or at least in parts of it.
[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/timeline/8v6gc06xa... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_Europe...