Talk about your vacation nation. No, not Greece. Germany.
This isn’t really news, of course. “Germans may accuse spendthrift euro zone southerners of too much play and not enough work, but they enjoy the most generous annual holiday time in the European Union, a study released on Wednesday showed.”
Hey, it’s nice to be the king.
Keine anderen Europäer haben mehr freie Tage im Jahr – insgesamt sind es jeweils 40.
Observing Hermann 
The people who repeat this are boneheads. Anyone can have any amount of vacation time that they like. They just shouldn’t expect to be paid for it.
Think of it this way. This guy, let’s call him Joe, gets two weeks of vacation a year. This other guy, le’s call him Karalambous, gets 10 weeks of vacation.
Joe gets 50 weeks of pay over the course of 12 months.
Karalambous gets 42 weeks of pay over the course of 12 months.
Who is it that’s really “getting more” of anything?… other than being fed more of a shinola sandwich, that is.