American critics, like Adam S. Posen, the deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, say that Germany needs to do more. “As a hugely export dependent economy, they have the most to gain from others’ fiscal efforts,” he said, “and the most at risk if the global trade contracts further  worse if they are accused of free-riding on leakage from others’ programs.”

Image Michael Hartmann, whose employer in Vienenburg, Germany, cut his work hours, is using the time off to get more training. Credit... Jan-Peter Boening for The New York Times

Mr. Posen and others argue that while Germany may be doing more stimulus spending than others in Europe, it is counseling other European countries  many of which share the euro as their common currency  not to spend their way out of recession either, but to count on their safety nets to do much of the job.

“They’re the ones who basically browbeat other countries into not spending,” he said, “who give intellectual and political backbone to other countries’ conservative leanings not to stimulate.”

Without knowing it, Mr. Koppe’s 25 employees are playing their small part in keeping the German economy afloat. But nearly 70,000 employees of the automaker Daimler have been placed on short-hour status. On the bright side, it means they are able to play with their children, tend to their gardens or  with further government incentives  receive the kind of advanced training that will make them even more skilled when orders pick up again.

Harder times all but certainly lie ahead for Germany. Commerzbank said Monday that it expected the German economy to contract by a shocking 6 to 7 percent in 2009, roughly double earlier projections and the worst decline of the postwar era. Critics of the German government’s cautious approach to stimulus fear that because Germany is feeling the brunt of the worldwide recession last, its policymakers are underestimating its force.

Indeed, to travel between the United States and Germany is to find two countries experiencing the economic slowdown completely differently. The severity of the downturn does not appear to have sunk in yet in for Germans. There was no real estate bubble here, and few people have a substantial portion of their savings or retirement accounts invested in the stock market. The unemployment rate has risen more than a percentage point, to 8.5 percent in February from 7.1 percent last November. But, significantly, the latest figure is still lower than it was just a year ago.

“In contrast to America, our social systems are not on the decline right now,” Mrs. Merkel said Sunday night in a widely watched interview on a television talk show. “Pensions are not cut, unemployment insurance is not reduced. On the contrary, we can register stable and, in some sectors, also rising expenditures, and this makes me hope that our social market economy will enable us to cope with this complicated situation.”