Books: Jules Verne`s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea Revisited

 (Drivebycuriosity) - Xixin Liu, the author of the "Three Body Problem", confessed that a Jules Verne novel introduced him in his childhood into science fiction and kindled his interest in the genre. A Jules Verne reader for young adults was also my introduction into scifi. The French writer is indeed the father of science fiction and inspired the genre with his positive thinking, his optimistic attitude and his belief in science & technology ( driveby). 

Recently I reread his "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea". Captain Nemo and his submarine Nautilus are part of the world cultural heritage - like Odysseus. The novel follows two involuntary passengers who accompany the travels of the Nautilus around the world. Verne wanted to entertain, but also to educate. He wrote of course for a 19th century audience, who had much less knowledge than people today. 

 

                         Nautical Towns 

One sentence by Nemo inspires my imagination: "The sea supplies all my wants". The Captain and his crew indeed lived from fish, shellfish, turtles, oceanic plants like algae, sea cucumber, sea weed, and many minerals and other materials which are abundant in the oceans. The dependence on the sea reminds me a bit of Japanese cuisine, that had developed in an islandish country with a large population, but little space for agriculture to feed them. I also believe that sea food in general is very healthy and the oceans will gain more important for supporting the future of humankind. And for me is the idea of traveling months or even years in a submarine way more appealing than a years long journey in a spaceship towards lifeless Mars.

Another idea by Verne`s Nemo sounds also inspiring: "I can imagine the foundations of nautical towns, clusters of submarine houses, which, like the Nautilus, would ascend every morning to breath at the surface of the water, free towns, independent cities." Indeed I could imagine cities build on ships, maybe retired oil tankers and container ships. Their residents could escape burgeoning real estate prices and be free of despotic governments.  

 

                 Submarine Forests  

I enjoyed Nemo`s and his passenger`s travels and find Verne`s somewhat antique style charming. And the submarine worlds he described are amazing: 

"The rays of the sun struck the surface of the waves at rather an oblique angle, and the touch of their light, decomposed by refraction as through prism, flowers, rocks, plants, shells, and polypi were shaded at the edges by the seven solar colors. It was  marvellous, a feast for the eyes, this complications of colored tints, a perfect kaleidoscope of green, yellow, orange, violet, indigo, and blue; in one word, the whole palette of an enthusiastic colorist".

"The forest was composed of large tree-plants. Not a herb which carpeted the ground, not a branch which clothed the trees, was either broken or bent, nor did they extend horizontally; all stretched up to the surface of the ocean. Not a filament, not a ribbon, however thin they might be, but kept straight as a rod of iron".

The image above is a screenshot from an Apple screensaver showing some submarine plants - known as kelp  ( google)

The novel is part of a giant Verne omnibus reader: Jules Verne: Complete Works (Wisehouse Classics) (47 novels! more than 10,000 pages! amazon). According to editor comments some sentences and paragraphs are erased, but this does not interrupt the plot and I did not miss them. 

Since the whole volume costs just 99 cents it doesn`t matter.   

Books: The Blue Hour By Paula Hawkins

 

(Drivebycuriosity) - A while ago I enjoyed the psychological thriller "The Girl on the Train" by Paula Hawkins (my review ) - and later the movie adaption with Emily Blunt ( review). Therefore I gave another book by the author a try: "The Blue Hour" ( amazon). 

An employee of an art gallery, who is obsessed with the work of a late female artist, travels to a remote island where the artist had lived to investigate about her estate. There he has to a deal with an uncooperative woman who has been somewhat connected with the artist and still has control over the artist`s works (this is a spoiler free blog).

The plot develops very slowly and in several threads, following the art gallery employee and parallelly the woman on the island, blended with the diary of the late artist (this is spoiler free blog). The storyline focuses first on the artwork and expanses then to the complex personal lives of all participates, becoming more and more mysterious and violent. 

I have problems with the characters, especially with the males, who are either creeps & violent or meek & overtrusting. The dramatic finally is obviously written for the big screen.

Books: A Cause For Alarm By Eric Ambler

(Drivebycuriosity) - I am usually sceptical about book recommendations because the taste of the crowd does not agree with me. But a recommendation on the blog Marginal Revolution, a bag of miracles (Wundertüte)  that I scroll weekly, got my attention. Tyler Cowen, a polymath and owner of the blog, praised Eric Ambler´s novel "Cause for Alarm" and claims that the author "redefines what it means to be a good writer of thrillers" (marginalrevolution ). Since I enjoyed some of Cowen´s recommendations in the past and Eric Ambler is famous, I gave it a try.

Unfortunately, the novel ( amazon) did not work for me. The plot reads a like theater of the absurd, for instance Ionesco`s "The Bald Soprano". The plot starts in England during the 1930s recession, when an engineer loses his job. The protagonist found another job, now as a sales representative for a English manufacturer in Italy, which was ruled by Mussolini and the Fascists. In Milan he makes the acquaintance with two shady men, who talk him into politically risky activities, which starts a chain of events (this is a spoiler free blog). 

I find the naivety of the protagonist unbelievable, his actions incredible and the other important characters bizarre. Maybe the ridiculous story was shaped by the left-wing world view of Ambler, who was famous for his  thrillers with a Marxist touch ( web.archive).   

In future I will be more skeptical with book recommendations on Cowen´s Marginal Revolution.  

Contemporary Art: Soft Horizons @ Plato New York

 (Drivebycuriosity) - Contemporary art is full of surprises. On a resent walk on Manhattan`s popular Bowery I spotted an interesting show @ gallery Plato. The art dealer displayed works by the Canadian Erik Nieminen. The show is called "Soft Horizons" (platogallery ). I show here my favorites, a very subjective selection as usual.

 

The press release claims that "drawing inspiration from classical mythology, historical narratives and the digital age, this evolving body of work blurs the boundaries between creation and decay, reality and imagination". 

 

The press release adds: "A key theme of the exhibition is the interplay between control and chaos. Some paintings exude meticulous order, while others are layered with change and fluidity, inviting ambiguity. The ‘grey area’ – a space of curiosity and transformation – emerges as a central motif, challenging rigid binaries of good and bad, past and future. This liminal space, much like history itself, is constantly rewritten".
 

To be continued 

Books: Brothers Grimm - A Biography By Ann Schmiesing

 

(Drivebycuriosity) - Almost everybody knows "Snow White", "Hänsel and Gretel", "Cinderella" & "Rumpelstilzkin", the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm. Ann Schmiesing describes in "The Brothers Grimm - A Biography" the life of Jacob (1785–1863) & Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859) ( amazon).

The brothers are famous for collecting & publishing fairy tales, but they saw themselves as scholars and even scientists and they worked all their lives on much larger projects.

 

      1. Strengthening German Identity 

Their main goal was to preserve the German cultural heritage. The Grimms thought it necessary to strengthen Germany´s identity because the state "Germany" did not exist in their lifetimes. Before the unification in 1871 existed a patchwork of about 300 independent German speaking polities - kingdoms, duchies, counties, electorates and independent cities like Hamburg & Frankfurt; and the European continent was shaken by the rise and fall of Napoleon and the related wars & revolutions. 

The Grimm Brothers grew up - and lived many years - in a remote area, named Hessen, that in the early 19th century was occupied by France and ruled by Napoleon, his brothers and other French authorities. Their lives were influenced by the physical and cultural devastation caused by the Napoleonic Wars and their work can be seen as an answer to French cultural dominance and military occupation. 

Jacob & Wilhelm wanted to support the struggle against Napoleon. According to the biographer the brothers focused on uncovering the Germanic past by working on older literature partly as a response to the French occupation and the advent of French cultural and political influence. Jacob believed that the shared German heritage pointed the way to a unified German political state. But they also appreciated other national traditions and they published studies pertaining to the languages and literature of Scandinavia, Spain, Ireland, and Eastern Europe, among other nations or regions.

            2. Promoting German Culture

The Grimms were also driven "by the desire to preserve something considered valuable before it might be lost". They feared that the German cultural heritage, represented by language, fairy tales and legends, "had been injured by urbanization, industrialization and related factors" and might vanish soon. Therefore they created significant inputs to social sciences like linguistic, literary history, mythography, runology, folklore, medieval studies and lexicography. 

Jacob worked years on a book about "German Grammar" and published 1,100 pages in the year 1822. "Grammar" was groundbreaking because it helped establish linguistic as a science. Jacob´s detection of how sounds in the German languages had in the distant past systematically shifted became famous as Grimm`s law. The significance of this work has been compared to that of Darwin`s "On the Origin of Species". Grimm`s contemporary, the poet & literature critic, Heinrich Heine likened "Grammar" to a colossal Gothic cathedral in which the various Germanic peoples sang together, each in their own dialects.  

Close to the end of their lives the brothers worked together on their grand dictionary project, with the goal providing a dictionary that would be comprehensive not just with respect to words defined, but also in term of cultural heritage. They thought that "High German" was important for the German cultural heritage and therefore to the goal of German unification. Jacob also published works on German law and mythology and a two-volume "History of the German Language". 

3. Fighting For Freedom & Against Censorship

But the brothers didn´t just live on an ivory tower of science. They were political and romantics, skeptical of monarchy, devoted to free speech, opposed to the censorship of literature and the arts. Threatened by burgeoning literacy rates, the rulers of the German kingdoms, duchies and electorates became more zealous in controlling what people could and could not read. Wilhelm wrote in 1815: "The rulers have shown little insights into the lives of their people and little willingness. Nevertheless, I am firmly convinced that a good seed has not only been sown but has also sprouted and can no longer be suppressed. If only it can grow slowly, it will grow that much securely, just as nature manifests itself more nobly in plants that need a longer time to grow but are, as a result, more durable." 

The Grimms were part of a group of professors at  University of Göttingen (Göttingen Seven) who wrote and signed a statement protesting against the annulment of the constitution of the Kingdom of Hanover by its new ruler, King Ernest Augustus, and refused to swear an oath to the king. As a result the Grimms and the other signers got fired and they had to leave the kingdom immediately to avoid arrest. Today they are celebrated for their bold commitment to liberty. 

 

  4. Creating An UNESCO ‘Memory of the World’ Heritage Document 

Almost as a byproduct Jacob & Wilhelm created an UNESCO ‘Memory of the World’ Heritage Document: Their famous "Kinder und Hausmärchen" (Children’s and Household Tales). Their informants were literate, middle-class, young adult townspeople and they did not conform to the prevalent image of the storyteller as an uneducated, older peasant woman from the countryside. 

The Grimms often edited and altered the plots, for instance in an earlier version "Rumpelstiltskin merely run away in rage after the miller´s daughter correctly guesses his name", in a later version "Rumpelstiltskin angrily stomps his right foot into the ground and sinks up to his waist, then pulls his left foot so forcibly that he tears in two and destroys himself". Wilhelm also mixed two or more tales to form the version presented in the second version.

 

                   5. Personal Struggles

Grimm`s work is even more impressive because all their lives both brothers were struggling. Wilhelm had severe health issues, he suffered from asthma and had a troublesome heart ailment. And the Grimms had to deal with stressed finances because their salaries at universities, libraries and other employments were meager and their "Kinder und Hausmärchen" wasn´t a success during their life time. "They often rationed their food, at times sharing portions among themselves, skipping meals, going out without wine, and cutting out evening tea when the price of sugar rose too high".

 

                6. Conclusion 

 The biographer concludes: "Through tens of thousands of painstakingly researched pages of published scholarship and collected texts, the Grimms were among the foremost contributors to the post-Napoleonic German national awakening. Together or individually, they had collected folk songs, fairy tales, legends, myths, customs, legal texts, and related documents attesting to the cultural production of the German-speaking lands."   

Ann Schmiesing, a professor and administrator at the University of Colorado Boulder, did an impressive job. Besides covering the lives of the brothers and their families & friends, she also introduced the reader into a historical epoch of the German speaking lands and describes the fundamental political movements that changed the world of the Grimms. 

This blog post is just a condensate and it might be biased by my own world view as an economist, therefore I really recommend reading this wonderful book. 

PS On top of this post I use a fictional image of Dorothea Viehmann, the woman who allegedly delivered most of the fairy tales. The image represents the Grimms visiting Viehmann at her cottage.  

Photography: Manhattan`s Billboards 2025

 (Drivebycuriosity) - I am fascinated by New York City, where I have been living since 2012. I am amazed by the hustle & bustle and the sheer size of the metropolis. Part of the fascination are the huge billboards you can spot all over Manhattan.

 

 

The billboards give the streets a cinematic quality.  

 

Ain`t they beautiful? 

 

Stay tuned 

Books: Eleven By Patricia Highsmith

 

(Drivebycuriosity) - Patricia Highsmith belonged to the most important writers of the 20th century, blending art with entertainment. Her murderous tales are deeply influenced by Sigmund Freud and her own secret obsessions. The short story collection "Eleven" gives a perfect introduction into her work ( amazon).

The Highsmith was obsessed by snails. She kept about 300 in her home and took her favorite, Hortense, on travels. It is not surprising that the collection has 2 snail stories. The famous "The Snail Watcher" (10 pages) is about scientific interest that turns into obsession and then into horror. The 2nd snail story, "The Quest for Blank Claveringi" (19 pages), is a fairy tale that reminds of Brother Grimms`and also a bit of Robert Louis Stevenson´s South Sea Tales, set on a remote tropical island. The Highsmith showed that she is also a master in the genre of old fashioned (in a good sense) adventure stories.

"When the Fleet was at Mobile" is a sad story about an unfortunate girl. Highsmith`s tales are usually not friendly to women, but here she was. The story "Mr. Afton, Among the Gree Braes", focuses on a psychological analyst, inspired by her deep interest in psychology and the lectures of Sigmund Freud. In "The Heroine" a family hired a very strange girl as a nurse for their children and trusted her blindly? Really a good idea? In "The Barbarians" rowdy people play noisy ball games and destroy plants in the back yard, making the residents suffer. Reminds me of Manhattan´s Lower East Side and the late nightly open air parties.

Alone the snail stories are already worth reading the book. 

 

 

Books: Exploring The Fascinating World Of Beer

 

 (Drivebycuriosity) - Do you like beer? For me it is an acquired taste. I gave up on barley juice when I lived in Germany, because I found the German brews boring and - having lots of calories - they raised my weight.

I rekindled my interest in beer when I began to live in the US and got introduced into the varieties of American craft beers, especially IPS, and become a connoisseur of artisan fermented grain juices.

The little booklet "Exploring The Fascinating World Of Beer" by Marc Ferrari gives a nice introduction (about 75 pages amazon ). The author describes the history of beer - starting with the Sumerians - and tells how barley - or other grains - are turned into malt and then fermented into beer; he names the importance of the different kinds of yeast & hops and sketches the divergent brewing methods for lager beer ( including Pils ) and ales (including IPAs) and the importance of the mineral content of water. Ferrari also covers the economics of beer brewing, the influence of the industrial revolution & technological progress.

 

                   Health Aspects 

I find especially the health aspects interesting. Beer reduces the risk of heart disease! "Beer contains antioxidants that help prevent to oxidation of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, also known as ´bad`cholesterol, which can lead to the formation of plaque in the arteries. Additionally, beer contains flavonoids, which have anti-inflammatory properties that can further reduce the risk of heart disease." 

The book was written in a simple language - with plenty repeats - , but has a lot useful information and it hits the spot. 

Economics: Why Did The Unstoppable Rise Of E-Commerce Come To A Halt?

 

 (Drivebycuriosity) - There is much ado about the allegedly unstoppable rise of e-commerce, but data from the UK show that the advance of online shopping came to an halt - at least in percentages of total retail sales. The image on the top displays the trend in the UK over the last 20 years ( ons.gov.uk). Before 2020 e-commerce gained annually on average about 1.3 percentage points and climbed from 2.8% in February 2007 up to 19.1% in February 2020.

 

During Covid the rise suddenly accelerated and peaked in January 2021. The pandemic forced many to stay at home, to avoid crowded shops and to buy online. Therefore internet sales jumped up to 37.8% of the total retail sales. But when the pandemic came to an end, people went out again and restarted visiting shops - and e-commerce dropped relatively.

 

I expected that the pre-Covid trend will restart after a while - just on a lower level. But so far I have been proven wrong. In the recent 12 months the quotient dropped from 26.3% (April 2024) to 25.9% (April 2025). 

What are the reasons? There are no reports that could explain the setback, I can only speculate. I suppose that many people had enough from the Covid curfews and enjoy going out even more. Maybe they prefer to go shops - crowded or not - where they can meet & watch other people? 

But I believe that the advantages of online shopping - like fast & free deliveries to the home door and huge selections - will get even stronger over time and the upwards trend will return. Time will tell.

 

 

Science Fiction: Valuable Humans In Transit And Other Stories

 (Drivebycuriosity) - Being a connoisseur of science fiction I am always on the quest for new voices, those who turn science into entertaining tales, the heirs of Arthur C. Clarke & Isaac Asimov. A while ago I discovered a writer with the pseudonym qntm, who´s very weird novella "There is no Antimemetics Division" fascinated me, even though I did not fully understand it (my review ). The author can write, owns plenty of imagination and seems to be well educated in mathematics, information theory, astrophysics and the like.

I just finished the collection "Valuable Humans in Transit and other Stories" (amazon ). The crisp 9 shorts and essays did not disappoint.

I have 3 favorites:

 "Gorge", a slick space opera. The staff of a space ship discovers a sphere drifting in space that has very strange properties. They begin to explore it, with disconcerting results (this is a spoiler free block). The tale reminds of the best stories of Asimove & Clarke 

"A Powerful Culture" belongs to the best alternate worlds & parallel universes stories I read - and I had read a lot  

"The Frame-by-Frame" is a funny tale where the diverse software threads of a self-driving car are discussing with each other about a suddenly approaching challenging traffic situation, using all available information

The rest includes musings about cutting edge physicists and those who support them, digital brain enhancement, a hostage situation, a meteor disaster and more. 

I indulged into qntm´s dry style. Here a taster: "The town is like fog; so spaced out that you barely notify you`ve entered it. I failed to find anything resemble a center. I couldn´t help but think it must be made entirely of suburbs".    

Highly recommended for readers who are interested into cutting edge science fiction.  

Books: Act Of Oblivion By Robert Harris

 

(Drivebycuriosity) - The 17th century in England was a bloody mess, full of violence. After the death of Elizabeth I the Stuarts became kings. The son and the grand sons of Elizabeth`s nemesis Maria Stuart intended to turn England`s history back and tried to nullify the Anti-Catholic reforms of the Tudors. Especially the regime of Charles I, an absolutist and tyrannic ruler, ruined England and cost the lives of many. Charles`tyranny lead finally to a revolution and his execution in the year 1649, followed by a republic, led by Oliver Cromwell (very well described in Jonathan Healey`s "The Blazing World - A New History of Revolutionary England" my review ). 

Robert Harris`novel "Act of Oblivion" begins about 20 years after the execution (amazon ). Another Stuart became king, Charles II, the son of the executed, another absolutist ruler & tyrant. It goes without saying that the new king started a bloody revenge and ordered a hunt for those who participated directly or indirectly on the execution, the regicides. The plot follows two of the regicides, who had fled over the ocean and tried to hide in the English colonies, and one (fictional) man, who has just one target, to catch the regicides and to kill them.

It is a sad & sinister plot, maybe about karma - this comes from that - and also about revenge, obsession, fanaticism, bigotry, superstition and politics. The plot is well told. Harris describes 17th century London, the roughness of the English American settlements, the violence of conflicting radicals and more impressively. "It seems that wherever you go, disaster follows". 

But the plot became too depressing and the finale  seems ridiculous & implausible too me. I stick with Healey`s history. 

Contemporary Art: Carnage By Xavier Baxter @ The Hole New York

(Drivebycuriosity) - Do you like powerful abstracts? Recently I spotted a show at the gallery "The Hole" on Manhattan`s popular Bowery ( thehole). They displayed paintings by Xavier Baxter, the exhibition was called "Carnage".

 

The post starts with "Disconnect" (2025, oil, pigment sticks and charcoal on canvas 96 x 120 inches, 244 x 305 cm) followed by "In a Trance" & "Hold Me".

 

Above follow "Time"; "Blue Moon" & "Power II". 

 

To be continued 

Books: Living On Earth: Forest, Corals, Consciousness, And The Making Of The World

(Drivebycuriosity) - I am fascinated by evolution, how we and every living thing around us developed. Peter Godfrey-Smith takes the reader on a journey through time and narrates about how human being evolved, developed social behavior and then created cities: "Living on Earth: Forest, Corals, Consciousness, and the making World" (about 250 pages amazon). The author is a professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. 

The author writes about his frequent dives at Australian coasts - where he watched octopuses and other live forms -, his hikes in his native Australian forest and his visits of the African rain forest. Besides his own extensive research Godfrey-Smith processes the work of many others, including geneticists, historians & philosophers. I enjoyed the 9 essays with more than 40 chapters very much and I learned a lot, but the book blossoms in many directions and it is too eclectic to write a fair review.

Anyway, here are some tidbits: 

                     Pockets Of Order

Our world is ruled by the laws of thermodynamics and entropy and order turns finally order in disorder, everything will fall apart. But a living organism is - temporarily - "a pocket of order, a cluster of chemical processes that maintains itself, self-perpetuates, keeps re-creating its otherwise improbable organization".

"Life on earth might have get started around ocean vents, where a natural flow of energy and materials comes up from beneath the earth, and porous rocks provide compartments in which reactions can be partly confined. From there, some of these cycling tangles of activity could start to produce boundaries - rough and imperfect - that are self-made rather than externally provided. The result is something increasingly cell-like."

"The more stable of these cell-like pockets of order will persist, and might bud off new one, like daughters, containing small sample of these interacting chemicals.........Each one is self-perpetuating, maintaining itself through cycles of chemical reactions, and occasionally creating new system of the same kind".

"Pockets of organization, making use of a source of energy and some initial way for reactions to compartmentalize, leading to cell-like self-maintaining beings that proliferate within a more chaotic and disorderly sea around them."

                    Darwinian Competition

Godfrey-Smith quotes also Richard Dawkin´s book "The Selfish Gene": "Life begins with replication, with some molecules arising that produce copies of itself. These copying molecules spread, become numerous, and can also have effects on what is around them that influence their chances of being copied. Some are better at this than others, and through this initial Darwinian competition they become able to form cells and control metabolic processes, slowly bringing more of the world under their control".

What we call "life" usually involves both of these phenomena (metabolism & reproduction) - the use of energy to maintain order, and the production of new living being from old.

And there is more, for instance: 

"The world gets warmer, that leads to more carbon being locked up in rock by the geological carbon cycle, and this (eventually) makes things cooler, heading back to where we started".

"In the early history of the transformation of the environment by living organisms, effects were mostly achieved by producing and modifying chemicals. Sometimes, as with plants and rivers, organism had effects through their growth and form".

 

     Shrieks, Cheeps & Soprano Cadences

We learn about birds: "Small parrots appeared in large flocks...They gathered in trees, filled them, turned a dead tree from gray into sparkling yellow-green. Occasionally they flight together and came swooping and rocketing over the water hole, over our heads. We could hear and feel the thousand of small wing beats."   

"King Parrots emit single soprano notes of a half-second of so when they are sitting, and a great mixed-up blast of sound when flying.... some have a call like the squeak of a rusted gate, or a cork being pulled from a bottle. When all are going at once, the air fills with shrieks, cheeps, a few soprano cadences, and, as if n celebration, corks being pulled from wine bottles, over and over again".

 

                    Chemical Communication

Godfrey-Smith describes how living beings communicate, for instance "bacteria communicate by releasing and absorbing chemicals. They use chemical communication to work out how many other cells of the same kind are around (this is called "quorum sensing")". 

He sums up: "Life, pockets of order and the control of energy, appeared early on Earth. Life exists within flows, in traffic, using resources and changing its environment. Life includes reproduction, along with the metabolic control of processes. With reproduction comes recurrence and multiplication: a few give rise to many. With multiplication, variation, and the inheritance of traits comes a Darwinian process of evolution by natural selection". 

I chose this books because I loved Godfrey-Smith`s book "Metazoa - Animal life and the Birth of the Mind" that I find better accessible" (my review). I recommend to start with "Metazoa" and maybe continue with "Living on Earth".   

 

 
 

Football: 1. FC Heidenheim 1846 - How A Small City Club Establishes In Germany`s First League

 (Drivebycuriosity) - If you are interested in football, in the US known as soccer, you might follow Deutsche  Bundesliga. Then you might know clubs with huge budgets like Bayern München, Dortmund, Red Bull Leibzig, VFL Wolfsburg (owned by Volkswagen) or Bayer Leverkusen, owned by pharma giant Bayer. But since summer 2023 there exists also a micro-budget club: 1. FC Heidenheim 1846, at home in a tiny industrial town (50,000 residents) between Stuttgart and Munich. The club isn´t supported by the fan base of a big city, neither are there huge sponsors. Anyway, they established themselves - by staying there without relegations - and will start their third Bundesliga season coming August. 

Heidenheim`s success was made by Frank Schmidt, the lead coach of the club. In 2007, Schmidt, a former soccer player, who also is educated in banking (Bankkaufmann), took the lead of Heidenheim when they played just in Germany´s Oberliga, the fourth tier of the professional system. Since then he led the club upwards, even with tiny budgets, and reached Bundesliga in summer 2023. And - contrary to other coaches - he never suffered a relegation.  

 

                      Combative Mindset

In his autobiography "Unkaputtbar" Schmidt tells the club`s history and explains his concept ( amazon). The word means "indestructible", contrary to the German term "kaputt gehen" - a quote by another German football coach, who praised Heidenheim`s & Schmidt`s very combative mindset.

According to Schmidt, Heidenheim`s sociological & economical background is shaped by the climate (highest and coldest stadium in German professional football) and the frugal regional "Swabian" mentality. Because Heidenheim relies on a tiny budget, the club could not keep top players for long. If one of them got attention, for instance as goal shooter, a bigger club wanted to buy him (the contract between club & player). These transfers supported the finances of the little club.

The first Bundesliga season after Heidenheim`s promotion went surprisingly well. On match day 34, the last of the season, the club finished on place 8 - out of 18 -, that permitted them to participate in the Conference League, a pan-European tournament, where they competed against Chelsea and 7 more European teams.   

Unfortunately some transfers created a crisis in Heidenheim´s second Bundesliga season, that ended this week. Summer 2024 the management sold attacker Tim Kleindienst plus winger Jan-Niklas Beste to other clubs. Kleindienst went to Borussia Mönchengladbach (for €7 Mio.) and Beste joint Benfica Lissabon (for €8 Mio.), a club that participates in the European Champions League. Beste/Kleindienst had been the perfect soccer duo. Beste used to pass free kicks or corner shots straight to Kleindienst, often toward his head, who shot the ball straight into the opponent`s box. 

 

                   Struggling To Adapt

Heidenheim tried to replace the duo with other - much cheaper - players, like Leo Scienza, who had been top scorer in the third league with SSV Ulm 1846 and had helped his club to advance to second league. Heidenheim paid just €600,000, but unfortunately Scienza struggled to adapt to Bundesliga and coach Schmidt kept him most time on the bench. 

Thanks to the player sales in summer 2024  - and the extra strain from 10 matches in the Conference League - in season 2 Heidenheim accomplished just 3 Bundesliga home wins and finished on place 16 with just 29 points and a goal difference of minus 27. Being the No. 16 the club had to defend their Bundesliga spot in a relegation game against the No. 3 of the second league, SV Elversberg, that happened in 2 legs, Thursday May 22 and Monday May 26.

 

                    Last Minute Save

The first leg ended 2:2, but Heidenheim won the second 2:1 (4:3 in aggregate) thanks to a last minute goal by Scienza, who already assisted to the other 3 Heidenheim goals. Coach Schmidt had started without him in the first leg, but reactived Scienza after half-time break because Elversberg led 2:0. Scienza´s goal and his assists finally saved Heidenheim´s Bundesliga participation. 

Falling back to the second league could have reduced Heidenheim`s annual media-income (TV & global streaming) by about €40 Mio ( kicker.de). So Scienza justified the €600,000, that Heidenheim hat paid for him, by far. Let´s hope that the frugal management does not sell this gem, who´s contract runs through summer 2027, too soon.  

Good luck to Schmidt and 1. FC Heidenheim.