The place has been abandoned for a long time. One of those abandoned rural stations that you see through a train window, imagining a bygone era when the place was home to village life. Tesla changed everything. Fangschleuse, a small stop in the middle of the Brandenburg pine forests, on the regional line between Berlin and Frankfurt an der Oder, thirty kilometres from the capital, has become one of the most publicised places in the Federal Republic of Germany in two years.
The station is now one of the main service centres for Tesla’s Grünheide factory, which opened in March 2022 and employs 12,000 people. This place in Brandenburg, a rural land of 2.5 million inhabitants surrounding the vibrant metropolis of Berlin (3.7 million inhabitants), has become the scene of some of the biggest controversies and oppositions currently shaking German society: industry versus ecology, liberalism versus regulation, city versus countryside, East versus West.
At Fangschleuse, the ballet of trains, factory workers, trade unionists, political leaders, environmental activists and local activists meet daily. Those who come to work are the most recognisable: they wear black trousers and a jacket with the red Tesla logo. More than half of them come from Berlin. They walk in groups, often speak languages other than German and walk quickly to the bus that takes them to the huge industrial complex.
Strong pressure
We also meet a young, permanent employee of IG Metall who works in the beautiful caretaker’s house rented by the German union. IG Metall has turned it into an information and recruitment unit. “The interest is great”“This is a very important step,” says Markus Sievers, a union spokesman, who denounces the manufacturer’s strong pressure on employees. While welcoming Tesla’s presence in the region, the world’s first independent union is having difficulty accepting the fact that Elon Musk still refuses to bind the company to the sector’s collective agreement, at a site that will become Germany’s first car factory.
And then there’s Manu Hoyer. The 65-year-old, short-haired, dog-on-a-leash activist co-founded the Bürgerinitiative Grünheide, a local citizens’ initiative that has been fighting against the expansion of the factory for months. “Twenty years ago”He left the noisy Berlin, where he was born, to “Brandenburg calm”She says. Since Tesla moved in, she has accused the American manufacturer of destroying the facilities with the guilty blessing of the authorities. According to her, the felling of pine trees, truck deliveries and light pollution from the factory have destroyed the surrounding ecosystem.
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