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So last month Germany was mentioned in multiple articles as being in a terrible production decline and now it’s suddenly the opposite?

I guess the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

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To be honest, as a German I have no idea where this increase in productivity is supposed to have occurred. My experience and intuition is that Germany is suffering from a rise in lethargy and inefficiency ("German efficiency" is a meme that's utterly outdated and inapplicable, at least in my sector, IT).

I'd be happy to learn about concrete and representative information that balances my perspective but I have yet to see it.

As an outsider I found Germany very bureaucratic. Felt like my home country in the 80s

Production is the gross output. Productivity is production divided by the whole population or the working population.

You can easily have a situation were production shrinks but productivity is unchanged, e.g. because a cohort leaves the workforce and becomes pensioneers.

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