Here some more Details. The Emmy-Noether Program (EN) is a two phase excellence program with which outstanding German junior scientists are supposed to be brought back to Germany. The program entails two years PostDoc abroad and a 4 year position as a junior scientist group leader in Germany. This second phase (ENII) is subject to further application, a grant. The DFG has always emphasized that ENI doesn't guarantee ENII, but sells it as a program, where both phases go together.
In ENI I have worked under John Byrne (student of Nobel laureate Eric Kandel) in Houston, Texas on learning and memory in Aplysia. My homepage (http://brembs.net) tells all about it. During my stay there, I have published 1 paper in Science, two invited reviews, two conference posters and two more papers are currently in preparation (the DFG knows the content).
Thus I planned to have a German graduate student continue this not entirely unsuccessful field of research during my ENII. I backed all this up, not only with my own experience with Aplysia, but also with a promise by John Byrne to train the student in his lab, three international collaborations on Aplysia and a host institute with experience in some of the techniques.
All this seems to be sufficient to make it into the top 9% (67 letters of intent out of 743 submitted to the HFSP were selected to write full applications) internationally, but not enough to make it into the top 67% (the inofficial success-rate ENI->ENII) in Germany.