Beautiful, Helmut

Soccer player, national coach

Born: 15.09.1915 in Dresden

died: 23.02.1996 in Wiesbaden

Helmut Schön is still the most successful national coach in the history of German soccer. He is the only head coach of the men's national team to have won both the World Cup (1974) and the European Championship (1972).

In addition, the "man with the cap" reached another final in each of the two most important competitions in world soccer. In addition to his success as a coach and, before that, as a highly successful goalscorer with 17 goals in 16 international matches and two German championships and cup wins with Dresdner SC in the 1940s, Schön is also a highly interesting example of a German-German biography from the post-war period. Although he was repeatedly asked to join neither the NSDAP nor the SS, Schön did not stylize himself as a resistance fighter. Nevertheless, he was a member of the Reichskolonialbund.

Having grown up in Dresden, he moved to the West in the early 1950s, primarily for sporting reasons. In the 1951/52 season, he found his first job as a coach at Sportverein Wiesbaden 1899 e.V., which was playing in the second division at the time; he led the team to ninth place in the final table.

The city became home and retreat for the soccer coach over the following decades. "I liked Wiesbaden because it reminded me so much of Dresden: also a former royal seat, also a city of civil servants, the beautiful grounds, the forests all around ... But I soon realized that there was still more to do," Schön wrote in his memoirs published in 1978.

So the soccer coach left the city to work in Saarbrücken, where he was national coach of the Saarland, which was autonomous until 1955. But Wiesbaden remained his new home for the rest of his life. Initially he lived in Trommlerweg, later in a Neckermann prefabricated house in Paul-Lazarus-Straße 2 in the Klarenthal district, which was classic for the time.

Wiesbaden was an ideal location for Schön to work for the Frankfurt-based DFB, for whom Schön initially worked as an assistant coach for eight years from 1956 and later as national coach for 14 years until the end of the 1978 World Cup.

Schön, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease, spent the last years of his life in a nursing home. German soccer honored him with a memorial service at the Hessian State Theater in Wiesbaden. His grave is located in the North Cemetery in Wiesbaden. In September 2009, the city renamed the sports ground on Berliner Straße the Helmut Schön Sports Park in honor of the Wiesbadener by choice.

[This text was created in 2012 by Daniel Meuren for the printed version of the Wiesbaden city lexicon and supplemented in 2023 by Dr. Katherine Lukat]