Europe is redistributing enormous amount of money from rich to poor countries within EU. Spain would still look like an underdeveloped country without the massive injection of money coming from the EU. EU (the organisation), even with problems here and there and the need to take a good diet, is working wonderfully at equalizing the rich/poor countries. This is why most of the countries do not want Turkey to be part of EU, under the EU rules, this would mean an insane amount of money going to Turkey every year for maybe 30 years or more.

With respect to the article itself, not everything is rosy in Germany, a large part of the population is living out of the social help system (7.5 millions people) and another large par is getting miserable wages, in the range of 4€/h or less. So yes, the German economy is robust, but the social state is struggling too.