Understand
Among the West-German states, Baden-Württemberg is one of the youngest, having been founded in 1952 through a unification of administrative areas that, until the end of WW I in 1918, had been mostly covered by the kingdom of Württemberg, the grand-duchy of Baden and the kingdom of Hohenzollern. The consequence of this - and that's the important bit a traveller should know - is that there are now two tribes living together in the state: Badener in the west and Schwaben in the east. Both speak different dialects see below and share a love-hate relationship towards each other that's nurtured with a lot of humour. For what unites both tribes and the rest of the people living here is a pride for "their" Baden-Württemberg and what they have made of it since its creation, that's surprising for Germans from up north. Since 1999, the state has been advertising itself all over Germany with the slogan "We can do everything, except for speaking Standard German." Wir können alles, auÃer Hochdeutsch, a tongue-in-cheek play on the infamous dialects see below.
And indeed, Baden-Württemberg is doing quite well in terms of economics compared to other places in Germany. It boasts the lowest unemployment rate of the Federation, some of the best universities in Germany, a GDP per capita that rivals Switzerland and is the only German state that still has a higher birth than death rate. The European Statistics Office Eurostat has called Baden-Württemberg the "high-tech central of Europe". And, famously, the percentage of people owning their own home is by far the highest in Germany.
The main reason for all those superlatives lies deeply in the history of the land: Although nowadays there are about as many non-Catholics as Catholics living in Baden-Württemberg and a third group of comparable size without religous faith, during the reformation South-West Germany was strongly influenced by the schools of Martin Luther, John Calvin and Huldrych Zwingli, which left behind a society with moral values circling around hard work, self-control and the general motto "God helps those who help themselves".
Hence the country that was once dirt poor, having to struggle with hard winters and frequent famines, today is plastered with high technology companies. The most important sectors are mechanical engineering most famously Robert Bosch Inc., Chemistry, Biotechnology and, above all, Automobiles which were, in fact, invented here, as everyone will be happy to point out. Daimler and Porsche were founded and still have their headquarters around Stuttgart; Audi, Volkswagen and others have large plants in the state. If one counts in the small and medium-sized suppliers, every other employee in Baden-Württemberg is working for the car industry, directly or indirectly. As Max Weber, a philosopher at Heidelberg University said, around here, it's "Capitalism as it was meant to be".
