Isn’t this “fake” politeness part of the German culture? I see it in everything related to business communication, from banks, insurances, public services, etc. Even from retail stores. That has been explained to me as being part of the etiquette for proper communication, which seems to be quite important in Germany, even if everybody I asked agreed that it was empty and meaningless.
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It indeed is, in a way German culture is very similar to something like Japanese culture, where the social form is way more important than actual intent/content.
For the same reason, the German language has very complex honorifics [0].
Some Germans take real offense if you don't address them with the proper honorific or forget to list one of their, oh so important, honorific titles on some text communication.
Because of this, there exists quite a lively market to sell honorific titles, specifically aimed at German-speaking users [1], in that regard there still exists a very real "class distinction" in Germany.
Stuff like that always makes me wonder how much influence population density has on the evolution of such strict social dynamics.
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%B6flichkeitsform#Die_H%C3...
When living in Germany, I found that the Germans were quite blunt in comparison to the United States and discarded a lot of the word fluff and fake friendliness that I often see people using in the United States. They prefer to be direct and get to the point. There was no need to beat around the bush and hint politely at something. So the attitude of getting rid of the meaningless words and stick directly to the information seems like a very German attitude to me.
However, I also found (particularly in written contexts) that the Germans were really big on formality. If you don't use their proper titles, they'll get very upset. If the paperwork doesn't have an official stamp on it, it's meaningless waste paper. If it does have an official stamp on it, then it's holy and undisputed, no matter what nonsense is written on it. I'm surprised that there isn't a flourishing fake official stamp black market because of the importance people place on those things.
I find that all the fluff in German written documents revolves around formality, rather than fake politeness. I always got the feeling that all those extra, meaningless words and phrases were more about doing it the proper, formal way (no matter how meaningless that was), whereas in the United States, the people are much more informal, but use a lot of fluff words to convey fake friendliness.
German academic writing is ridiculous. There's so much formality and academic vocabulary involved that they'll write long, complex sentences with fancy vocabulary to convey a simple concept. It's about as formal as you can possibly imagine, so it's wordiness and complexity has to compensate.