If I had to guess I'd say Germany's average is brought down by the East-West divide still, I bet if you could get statistics for the two regions (or individual federal states) West Germany would be closer to Austria, the Netherlands, and Denmark, while East Germany would be closer to Poland, Czech, and Hungary.
You have to remember this is the first generation where East Germans are being taught English as a second language in school, before that it was Russian (or French in unified Germany but that's going too far back to matter, I think). There's also the debate about encouraging language use outside of the classroom, and Germany often gets caught up in the dub versus sub debate when it comes to American and British imports.
Meanwhile in Austria, Russians left the Russian occupation zone relatively early since their main goal in Austria was to keep it from joining NATO (which they did), so there was relatively little cultural effect- though there were some, and in region specific data you can sometimes see differences between the former Russian zone and the former American and British zone- and therefore little interference in things like language policy.
Also important, if you speak Standard German (Hochdeutsch) you can speak to 82 million other people. If you speak Standard Austrian German, you can speak to 8 million other people. Of course the two standard languages are closely related so that's an oversimplification but generally speaking it's more important for Austrians to learn either a new dialect or a new language to communicate outside their borders than it is for Germans, so why not keep up English outside of school?
Re: Percentage of population able to hold a conversation in English in the EU by country.
You have to remember this is the first generation where East Germans are being taught English as a second language in school, before that it was Russian (or French in unified Germany but that's going too far back to matter, I think). There's also the debate about encouraging language use outside of the classroom, and Germany often gets caught up in the dub versus sub debate when it comes to American and British imports.
Meanwhile in Austria, Russians left the Russian occupation zone relatively early since their main goal in Austria was to keep it from joining NATO (which they did), so there was relatively little cultural effect- though there were some, and in region specific data you can sometimes see differences between the former Russian zone and the former American and British zone- and therefore little interference in things like language policy.
Also important, if you speak Standard German (Hochdeutsch) you can speak to 82 million other people. If you speak Standard Austrian German, you can speak to 8 million other people. Of course the two standard languages are closely related so that's an oversimplification but generally speaking it's more important for Austrians to learn either a new dialect or a new language to communicate outside their borders than it is for Germans, so why not keep up English outside of school?