Boehringer Ingelheim is a pharmaceutical company with revenue of 27.8 billion euros in 2025. It still belongs to the descendants of its founder, Albert Boehringer. A great-grandson of the founder, Hubertus vom Baumbach, led its board until the summer of 2025. In September 2026 the chief executive, Shashank Deshpande, ruled out a stock market listing: Boehringer Ingelheim strebt keine Börsenlistung an. Boehringer Ingelheim does not seek a stock market listing. He also said: Ein Verkauf oder IPO ist nicht geplant. A sale or IPO is not planned. To the magazine Manager Magazin he explained: Wir sind nicht von externen Investoren oder Kapitalgebern abhängig, wir denken in Generationen, nicht in Quartalen. We do not depend on outside investors or lenders. We think in generations, not in quarters.
Thirteen Coaches in a Century
Otto Nerz took over the German national football team in 1926. A hundred years later, Jürgen Klopp became the 13th Bundestrainer, national coach, in the history of the German Football Association, the DFB. He started on 15 August 2026. Sepp Herberger was in charge for almost 28 years, from 1936 to 1964, with a break of several years during and after the Second World War. Helmut Schön followed him until 1978. Joachim Löw coached the team for 15 years, from 2006 to 2021. In 2018 Germany went out of the World Cup in the group stage. It was the worst German result at any World Cup. The DFB kept Löw. On 3 July 2018 he thanked the association for das Vertrauen, das der DFB weiterhin geschlossen in mich setzt, the trust that the DFB, united, continued to place in him. Then the pace changed. In September 2023 Hansi Flick became the first national coach in DFB history to be dismissed. His successor, Julian Nagelsmann, asked to end his contract after the disappointing World Cup of 2026.
Eight Months in the Test Lab
Stiftung Warentest, the German consumer testing foundation, grades washing machines also on how long they last. Three units of each model must each run 1,200 cycles in the lab, 600 washes at 90 degrees and 600 rinse-and-spin programs. Each machine is tested for eight months. The durability test makes up 20 percent of the overall grade. If a machine gets only ausreichend, sufficient, or mangelhaft, deficient, in the durability test, its overall grade cannot be better. In an earlier version of the test, each machine had to complete 1,840 washes, about ten years of use. In 2014 three of 13 models failed it and received the grade mangelhaft.
Seven Minutes for a Beer
Ein gutes Bier braucht sieben Minuten. A good beer needs seven minutes. The saying is about beer poured from the tap. The German Brewers’ Association lists the saying among die zehn bekanntesten Irrtümer über Bier, the ten best-known errors about beer. In April 2015 it wrote: Richtig ist: Ein frisches Bier kann und sollte in maximal zwei bis drei Minuten gezapft werden. What is right is that a fresh beer can and should be poured in two to three minutes at most. Michael Eder of the Doemens brewing school in Munich explains that the 7-Minuten-Regel, the seven-minute rule, comes from the time of old beer taps, when a Pils also held much more carbon dioxide than today. The same year, a sales director of the Bitburger brewing group said that the rule had not been valid for a long time.
Thirty Years for the Ode
Friedrich Schiller wrote his poem An die Freude, Ode to Joy, in the summer of 1785. Ludwig van Beethoven wanted to set it to music while he still lived in Bonn. A letter from 1793 says he planned to. It took him a good 30 years to complete it, in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony. The symphony was first performed in Vienna on 7 May 1824. By then it held more than six years of work and many changes. Since 1985 the instrumental version of Beethoven’s ode has been the official anthem of the European Union.
Hard Boards, Not Thick Ones
On 28 January 1919, in Munich, the sociologist Max Weber gave his lecture Politik als Beruf, politics as a vocation. It contains this sentence: Die Politik bedeutet ein starkes langsames Bohren von harten Brettern mit Leidenschaft und Augenmaß zugleich. Politics means a strong, slow drilling through hard boards, with passion and a sense of proportion at the same time. German politicians quote it often. Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier used it on 16 November 2015, when he presented the Federal Cross of Merit to two diplomats. In 2011 the writer Alexander Kluge called a book of 133 political stories Das Bohren harter Bretter, the drilling of hard boards.
In everyday speech the boards have changed. Many Germans say dicke Bretter bohren, to drill thick boards. A Protestant news site wrote in 2014 that many politicians describe their work as das Bohren dicker Bretter, and a FAZ review of Kluge’s book spoke of Webers Wort vom Bohren dicker Bretter. Weber wrote hard boards, not thick ones.
Care Before a Quick Shot
In September 2022, politicians from the opposition and from the governing coalition pressed Chancellor Olaf Scholz to send tanks to Ukraine faster. Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann of the FDP, a coalition party, asked: Auf was um Himmels willen warten wir noch? What in heaven’s name are we still waiting for? Scholz described his course as besonnen und entschieden, level-headed and decisive. On 17 February 2023 he explained his approach at the Munich Security Conference: Und bei allem Handlungsdruck, den es ohne Zweifel gibt: In dieser entscheidenden Frage gilt: Sorgfalt vor Schnellschuss, Zusammenhalt vor Solovorstellung. For all the pressure to act, which no doubt exists, this rule applies: care before a quick shot, unity before solo performances. He added that support had to be set up from the start so …, dass wir sie lange durchhalten, so that it can be kept up for a long time. By then, Germany had also agreed to deliver Western battle tanks.
The Street Sweeper in Momo
Michael Ende published Momo in 1973. In the book, the grey men, die grauen Herren, are a gang of time thieves. They pose as a Zeitsparkasse, a time savings bank, and persuade people to save time. Momo’s friend Beppo, the street sweeper, is the older, slower and calmer of her two closest friends. He explains to her how he sweeps a very long street: Man muß nur an den nächsten Schritt denken, an den nächsten Atemzug, an den nächsten Besenstrich. You only have to think of the next step, the next breath, the next stroke of the broom. The publisher Thienemann offers teaching materials for the book and recommends it for grades 5 to 8.
Back to Nine Years
In 2001 Saarland became the first western German state to shorten the Gymnasium, the academic high school, from nine years to eight. Most other states followed. The Abitur after only twelve school years got a nickname, the Turbo-Abitur. Then the states turned back. Lower Saxony returned to 13 years after the summer of 2015. Bavaria, Hesse and Schleswig-Holstein also decided to return. North Rhine-Westphalia began the change in the 2019/20 school year, and its first regular nine-year class takes the Abitur in 2027. An SPD education expert in the NRW state parliament said that politics had bowed to the pressure of business associations when it introduced the eight-year system. Pupils, he said, now needed more time for the development of their personality. The German Economic Institute estimated the direct cost of the return at about 1.2 billion euros nationwide. In Baden-Württemberg a parents’ initiative collected more than 100,000 signatures. On 29 January 2025 the state parliament passed a law to return to the nine-year Gymnasium from the 2025/26 school year.
The Permanent Forest
In 1922 the forest scientist Alfred Möller of Eberswalde published Der Dauerwaldgedanke, the idea of the permanent forest. Its core is the Stetigkeit des Waldwesens, the continuity of the forest as a living whole, above all by giving up clear-cutting. Möller’s example was the Bärenthoren estate, where Friedrich von Kalitsch had managed a pine forest this way since 1884. Von Kalitsch said: Ich mache niemals Kahlschläge und durchforste meinen ganzen Wald persönlich auszeichnend. I never clear-cut, and I personally mark the trees for thinning in my whole forest. Möller called clear-cut forestry Holzackerbau, timber farming. Under the German Empire, the usual practice was to plant single-species stands of spruce and pine and to harvest them after a few decades. A presentation on the website of the Brandenburg forest administration puts the idea in one line: Stetigkeit ist das Gegenteil von Plötzlichkeit. Continuity is the opposite of suddenness.