Chris Bowlby

You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Chris Bowlby, this week on assignments in Zwickau in Eastern Germany. In Zwickau, the main museum is devoted to the town's driving force. Ja da hat man sich erinnert, Mensch, hier in Zwickau, da gab es doch zwei Autofirmen. Wisst ihr noch wie die hieß?

Jokainen uusi generaatio paikallisista lapsista on esitetty tässä paikassa yllättävän historiallisen moottorimuotoilun. Viimeisellä maailmalla se oli Audiin syntyminen, joka teki kaunisista, suuresti poliittisia saluunia, joita me näemme täällä, ja joita maailman nopeimmat sportiilijat tekevät.

After the war history imposed a grating handbrake turn. Zwickau became part of communist East Germany, producing the Trabant car or Trabi, a byword for smelly two-stroke engines and western jokes about eastern motoring backwardness. Though there were some Trabi enthusiasts who defiantly raced their cars at Monte Carlo.

Then came 1989, the fall of the wall, the end of communism. I had family here and visited Zwickau soon afterwards. The most immediately visible change was new petrol stations. My relatives still drove a Trabi, but were constantly overtaken by hundreds of second-hand Western cars, swiftly imported as German road reunification raced ahead.

Toivottavasti uusi uusi elokuvan jälkeen, kun Volkswagen on tullut täältä rakentamaan uutta uutta uutta uutta uutta uutta uutta uutta uutta uutta uutta uutta uutta uutta uutta uutta

German Chancellor Angela Merkel no less visited Zwickaus VW factory as it converted from petrol to electric car production. It was part, she said, of a mobilitätswende, a big change in mobility, a conscious echo of what people called the political wende or change of 1989.

Zwickaus motor museum duly marked this change, says curator Andre Meyer, presenting it as the latest chapter in the town's manufacturing progress. This is one of the prototypes from Zwickau, and it's from 2018. And then two years later, in 2020, serial production would start, and it would ban the combustion engine from Zwickau entirely, which has head-shaped production here for more than a century.

Mutta tällä hetkellä tarina tulee uudelleen uuteen dramaan, joka on erittäin tärkeää ympäristön Eurooppaan. Tämä muuttaminen eläintekijöiden kanssa, jolla säästetään etäkulmasta, on kuitenkin todella kontroversioitavaa tänään maailmassa. Monet Suomessa huomioivat, etteivät he pysty kestämään eläintekijöiden kanssa.

Andrei Meier sanoo, että tulevaisuus moottorimuotoilusta täällä on nyt täynnä yllättymistä. Eikä kukaan tiedä. Museumissa teemme historiaa. Emme sano, että tämä on tulevaisuus. Mutta oletko miettinyt, että historia voisi tulla loppuun? Olemme miettineet.

Nyt huomiota on se, että eläinmobiili- tulevaisuudessa Suomessa vahvistettuna, Zwickaus moottori ei voi elää. Tällainen huomiota luo mahdollisen uuden järjestelmän Euroopan poliitikassa. Vastuullisuus vihreään poliisiin ja vahvistus petroliinikäyntiin.

You can sense Zwickaus political tensions here in the main square in front of the town hall. It's a Monday evening. Most citizens are catching trams to go home from work or stopping for a chat. But at one end of the square a meeting celebrating international women's rights is packing up.

At the other end are very different groups preparing for its small but regular Monday demonstrations. They've got flags, drums and loudspeakers. They're proclaiming friendship with Russia, demanding the resignation of the national government and promising what they call the maintenance of our traditions. Several police cars are positioned nervously nearby.

Green politics has historically been strong in Germany, with Greens joining coalition governments in Berlin. And you might have thought that a place where the main source of employment is producing electric cars would be full of Green enthusiasts, like Jakob Springfelt. His dad works at the VW factory, and he as a teenager helped found a group called Fridays for Future, campaigning on climate change.

Still only in his early twenties, he's become well known across Germany for his warnings about where politics is heading. He soon found climate change campaigning in Zwickau met sharp local hostility.

Kyllä. Todella iso tuntee pahaa paljon nuorilaisilta.

The neo-Nazis are a small, if very alarming, minority lurking in the Zwickau background. But anti-green feeling is now part of a much broader political trend among German parties, including the populists of the AfD or Alternativa für Deutschland party. It's had some surprising recruits. How old is this cello? This is from 1679.

Is it one of the famous manufacturers? It's from Cremona. In an elegant, high-ceilinged flat in Leipzig, a city famous for its music, I'm being shown a vintage cello by Matthias Mursdorf. He was a leading local chamber musician until, that is, he decided to go into politics.

There were protests because the party he joined was the AfD, described by Germany's constitutional authorities last year as right-wing extremist. That view was largely based on the party's attitudes towards migrants. It's now increasingly focused on opposing net zero.

Mr. Morsdorff, who became an AFD MP representing Zwickau in the German parliament, talks about the German economy needing reindustrialization. He wants it to be powered by fossil fuels and nuclear energy, mistakenly abandoned, he says, by Angela Merkel's government.

Se oli meidän päätöksemme Angela Merkelin puolesta, että lopettaisiin kaikki nukleaaripuolueet. Ja se oli yksi suurimmista ongelmista, joihin me nyt keskitymme. Luulen, että olit kutsunut sanoen, ettei se ollut vain poliittinen ongelma, vaan ongelma suomalaisille ihmisille. Sanoisin, että se oli ongelma suomalaisille ihmisille. Eikö tämä ole yllättävää kieltä?