Proud. When long-standing Volkswagen employees in Zwickau talk about the past, this one word comes up again and again. She was proud when she started here in 1990, says Silke Novotny. At that time, the GDR small car Trabant and the VW Polo were still being built here in parallel. "It was our incentive to be better than Wolfsburg," says the 59-year-old from the quality assurance department. And when it came down to it, everyone "clenched their jaws".
Volkswagen Sachsen is celebrating its 35th anniversary this Friday in Zwickau. And Novotny has been there from the start. "It's like a dream what has been created here." She talks about the immense noise in production at the time and how everything around the plant was a construction site. But it's not just the car factory itself that has developed, but also the surrounding infrastructure. "Compared to back then, it's a quantum leap today."
What began comparatively small with a few hundred employees was considered a success story for many years, despite some lean periods. But this has started to crack. While the site was celebrated as a pioneer of electromobility in the Volkswagen Group a few years ago, it is now struggling with weak sales on the car market. Staff have been cut and the night shift at both production lines has been canceled. In future, models are to be transferred to other VW locations.
