Motionless, hundreds of orange robot arms rise into the air. Some are still wrapped in plastic, instructions stick to it. In hall 2 of the Zwickau Volkswagen plant there is a standstill. Only from the back it shrieks and roars, a worker flexes there a steel beam.
Hall 2, the “Karohalle”, is the world of Heiko Rösch (51). Until recently, he led the body shop for the Passat Variant and Golf Sedan models on an area the size of eleven football fields. Thousands of cars hovered over his production line. Today, Rösch is organizing a major construction site so that the new electric model ID can be launched from autumn onwards. Every morning at 7.30 am, he meets with the construction companies who are to make his hall fit for the future. They have half an hour to bring him up to date.
Rösch has been working for VW for 27 years. Immediately after studying mechanical engineering, he started as a worker, a dream job: “At that time the image was still intact,” says