As a reminder: any year-over-year economic numbers still need to consider pandemic effects. Current numbers look bad when the baseline of a year ago was artificially high.
The pandemic shutdowns caused pent-up demand that became time-shifted, causing anomalously high results for that time period, and so year-over-year numbers a year later look worse. For the US, that happened starting in summer 2021, and thus we had that apparent recession in 2022 as those numbers were compared to 2021's artificially high baseline. The same is now happening for Germany, since the shutdowns lifted later in most of Europe, such that the early-2022 numbers had that time-shifted effect so that the early-2023 numbers seem to look bad.
(To illustrate the point: remember the "great resignation"? That wasn't a real effect, that was a statistical artifact of pent-up demand for normal job switching that didn't happen during the pandemic.)
For a real comparison, compare this year's numbers to 2019 and you'll see that economic growth looks fairly normal for a four-year period.
The pandemic shutdowns caused pent-up demand that became time-shifted, causing anomalously high results for that time period, and so year-over-year numbers a year later look worse. For the US, that happened starting in summer 2021, and thus we had that apparent recession in 2022 as those numbers were compared to 2021's artificially high baseline. The same is now happening for Germany, since the shutdowns lifted later in most of Europe, such that the early-2022 numbers had that time-shifted effect so that the early-2023 numbers seem to look bad.
(To illustrate the point: remember the "great resignation"? That wasn't a real effect, that was a statistical artifact of pent-up demand for normal job switching that didn't happen during the pandemic.)
For a real comparison, compare this year's numbers to 2019 and you'll see that economic growth looks fairly normal for a four-year period.