While I don't want to defend the german state, i think it should be mentioned that germany does have a pretty active pro-privacy movement. The chaos-computer club is big, with local chapters in nearly every city, very well connected and closely follows any movement from our government (and industry). While the german state itself may want as much control as possible, its attempts are always attacked by those groups.
These aren't attacks, just protests that are sometimes big enough to be mentioned in mainstream media to then be summarily dimissed by politicians, sometimes in very condescending tones or even derogatory language. The actual impact on the lawmaking process is negligible. Politicians have figured out that ignoring protests of privacy advocates is "safe", that is, it won't affect their reelection.
Suing against the legislation in the constitutional court is somewhat more effective, but it takes somewhere between 5 to 10 years to obtain a ruling againt a law that must be in effect before the process can even start.
If those attacks are completely negligable, was it the progressiveness and open mindedness of politicians that brought us to this point in history in terms of civil rights etc?
It was Hitler and Stalin. The Federal Republic of Germany was set up to have a constitution with very strong protections of individual freedom and democracy in response to the highjacking of the Weimar Republic constitution by the NSDAP. That state then evolved into a counterexample to German Democratic Republic while slowly gaining more and more independence from the Allied oversight that was put in place initially. There is a strong framework of rights and freedoms into the constitution as a legacy of these formation years. The main power that keeps that in place is the constitutional court with its long history of landmark decisions and a general tendency to overturn the steady trickle of new legislation that seeks to limit personal rights, mostly in the guise of better prosecution of crimes. For example, the right to control the use of one's own data is a result of ruling of that court. No lawmaker would have come up with that.
Best example IMO: for the last ~20 years, government after government has tried to push the essentially same data retention legislation. And everytime they do pass it, it gets shot down in a court. It's not even always the same people pushing it (although Merkel was chancellor for most of that time, but she never seemed to get involved directly, not her style) but at this point it's quite clear that "the government" simply wants these laws, constitutional or not.
