Heinrich Seidel (1842-1906) was a railway engineer by profession, but he gave up this career in 1880 to fully dedicate himself to writing. The humorous stories about the Berlin petty bourgeois Leberecht Hühnchen, created between 1880 and 1893, were his greatest success. Hühnchen, like Seidel an engineer, lives with his family in modest circumstances, yet knows how to be happy despite adverse conditions. What sounds naive and idyllic turns out to be a highly effective strategy against the challenges posed by the rapidly growing industrial city of Berlin at the end of the 19th century.