Welcome to Lidlville: can one billionaire’s vision revive Germany?
Downtown Heilbronn won’t win any architectural beauty contests – second World War bombers saw to that – yet this modest city near Stuttgart may well prove to be 21st century Germany’s rescue ring. Tucked into a curve of the Neckar river at the foot of rolling vineyards is an education, research and entrepreneur development – the Bildungscampus – bankrolled by a local boy made good. Dieter Schwarz is Germany’s wealthiest man, a discreet billionaire with a personal fortune Forbes magazine guesstimates at €58 billion. Lidl, the discount retailer he founded in 1973 is now a global powerhouse in over 30 countries. It, in turn, is part of a privately-held group that includes a shipping line and tech companies and, in 2025, posted a turnover of €185.6 billion. Schwarz never gives interviews and few photographs of him exist. Now aged 87, he has stipulated that the sole heir to his thriving business is his Dieter Schwarz Foundation. In the last decade, with Germany paralysed by low growth and self-doubt, the foundation has demonstrated in Heilbronn what this country is still capable of once it thinks big, acts fast and demands the best. This Swabian town of 133,000 people is now home to a sprawling campus with stylish buildings and high-end materials from Danish brick facades to oak parquet floors. Still a work-in-progress, by 2030 some 20,000 students will be based here. Overseeing this transformation is Prof Reinhold Geilsdörfer, chief executive of the Dieter Schwarz Foundation. He says the quality of the campus – material and immaterial – reflects closely how its sole benefactor thinks about money. “It’s fine for things to cost a bit more once they are sustainable and long-term,” said Prof Geilsdörfer. “One just shouldn’t spend money on nonsense.” The foundation’s investment in Heilbronn is as staggering as its ambition. First it bought entire swathes of land in the heart of town, then erected state-of-the art buildings and a landscaped campus. As each building is finished, it is kitted out and then handed over – rent-free – to leading academic institutions. The Technical University of Munich (TUM) and ETH Zürich, ranked the best universities in Germany and Europe respectively, are anchor tenants. The Dieter Schwarz foundation has agreed to fund 47 full professorships for 30 years covering subjects from architecture and engineering to computer science and management. Elsewhere in Heilbronn, the foundation funds a school, a science museum and a kindergarten teacher training college. The latest addition is IPAI, an artificial intelligence campus across town that calls itself the “global home of human AI”. It’s only when you zoom out of this complex jigsaw that the foundation’s strategy is clear from above: a complete chain of education, research and business-transformation institutions which, take together, are designed as a passport to future prosperity. For Schwarz, born in 1939 and raised in Heilbronn’s postwar ruins, returning so much of his wealth to his hometown gives it – and the surrounding country – a fighting chance to reinvent itself as a relevant, 21st century economic powerhouse. One that resists growing echoes of a darker past. “We’ve always been sure that education and research have a gigantic influence on future prosperity,” said Prof Geilsdörfer. “We can see that, where there are prosperity shifts in the wrong direction, a readiness grows to believe in simple slogans.” Another academic institution backed by the foundation here is a Heilbronn branch of the DHBW, a state-run dual vocational university that Geilsdörfer once headed. The Heilbronn retail and trade department has a reputation so good that, despite its Lidl backer, even arch-rival Aldi sends its trainees here. Head of department is Carsten Kortum, a former senior Lidl executive who – thanks to the Schwarz common denominator – sees parallels between his current and previous roles. “At Lidl the golden rule was, ‘be independent and do what you can yourself’ and we are doing the same thing here in Heilbronn,” said Kortum. “We are losing our independence in Germany, in particular with our dependence on US tech firms, but we are lucky to have a private benefactor willing to push us forward.” Even Germany’s federal government has signed up in Heilbronn with the arrival of two premier league primary research institutes: Max Planck and Fraunhofer. Free from public funding rules and tender constraints, the Bildungscampus streets are thoughtfully designed, from benches and paving to trees and signage: a rare example of an idealistic architectural rendering come to life. There is a light-filed seven-storey library, half a dozen cafes, two restaurants, a telemedicine cabin and even an automated 24-hour convenience store. In the stylish souterrain student restaurant, hidden under a grassy hillock, Egyptian man Ahmed Dwael looks pleasantly dazed by it all. The 24 year-old Cairo native is a month into his English-language management master’s degree here, where even non-EU students like him pay just €100 semester fees. “It would have cost me €16,000 elsewhere,” he said. “There is such a good atmosphere and everyone has made such an effort to make me feel at home.” Walk through the campus and random passersby just say hello. Like software engineering student David Rischow who takes me along to a campus maker space where – 24 hours a day – any student can play ping-pong, drink free coffee or access 3D printers, soldering irons and more. The 24 year-old has watched the campus transform Heilbronn – once a fading city dubbed Heilbronx – into a 21st century university town able to compete with historical German seats of learning like Heidelberg or Tübingen. “What makes it special is the high concentration of different institutions. They foster collaboration and joint projects and bring together students from diverse backgrounds,” he said. “There is a strong emphasis, too, on supporting students who want to develop their skills beyond their coursework – or perhaps even launch their own ventures in Campus Founders.” That institution, housed in another stylish building, is the last part of the Heilbronn campus puzzle. Campus Founders is a start-up and co-innovation hub that offers a new generation of innovators both the space and time to develop their ideas. In particular building partnerships with the billion-euro family-owned enterprises based in this southwest corner of Germany. “We are not building future competition here, we don’t want to disrupt but to transform,” said Florian Kratz, director of marketing communications. Aware of the cliches around such hybrid tech spaces, Kratz emphasises that Campus Founders, also backed by the foundation, is “a non-profit but not a charity”. “We think in an entrepreneurial way,” he said. “We are not here to entertain people: we want to see results.” From his ninth-floor office, Reinhold Geilsdörfer is pleased with the results so far after a decade heading the Dieter Schwarz foundation. His only wish is that Germany would reproduce this model at scale around the country. It certainly has enough billionaires to follow the example of Dieter Schwarz. “He does sensible things with his money. Others buy yachts and properties around the whole world but he doesn’t want to,” said Prof Geilsdörfer. Along with Schwarz, have Lidl shoppers, in their own way, made their contribution to this Heilbronn campus? Geilsdörfer smiles and nods: “But we’ve had to sell a lot of yoghurt for all this.”