When you read newspapers nowadays, you'd get the opinion that the economy in Germany is doing "great".
However, when I plot the population development in Germany vs. Switzerland, I get a very different picture: continuous and relative drastic decline since 1945.

When you look at the period 1913-1918 and beyond, you see a timely-constrained decline that is probably related to WWI. If you consider that WWII was not that much worse than WWII, the trend should go upward since about at least 1970 to 1980. However, it continues downward.

So while Switzerland is prosperous, if Germany is so, too - how do you explain the decline ? I mean obviously that's because Switzerland is gaining faster or losing slower than Germany - but why ?