Mara is sick. The 24-year-old has been living in a mosquito-infested forest near Tesla’s German gigafactory since March, and despite the 30 degrees Celsius heat, a cold is spreading in the camp. She sits on a makeshift bench and tells me how she left Berlin to live among the pines, about an hour’s drive outside the city, to prevent the company from expanding.
This week she will take part in a five-day protest alongside the notorious German climate group Here And No Further (Ende Gelände), known for its theatrical, often illegal blockades. According to an internal email obtained by the German newspaper, Tesla announced it would close the factory for four days and ask its employees to work from home Handelsblatt.
Despite the absence of Tesla workers, company employees and local authorities will be on high alert for troublemakers. The factory is separated from the forest by only a thin fence, and as I walk along the forest path that runs around the factory, a police car slowly rolls by, conducting patrols. On the two days I visit, a black Tesla stands guard at the end of the path connecting the factory fence and the forest camp.
Mara, who declined to give her last name, vaguely estimates that 50 to 100 people are involved in this anti-Tesla movement. But on a Thursday afternoon, things are quiet in the camp. Above us lies a city of tree houses. She shows me where she sleeps, a wide wooden platform – built about ten meters above the ground and draped with green tarpaulin. The height offers some protection from the mosquitoes, she says, as I catch three of them sinking into my arm at once. A man with a partially shaved head lies on a salmon-colored sofa and eats cake. Closer to the street, activists speak loudly about Israel. Several people are barefoot. The group expresses its politics with banners hanging on trees – electric cars are not “climate protection,” they are not “climate protection”; “Water is a human right”; “There is no anti-colonialism without a free Palestine.”
Germany is Europe’s heartland of automobile production and the birthplace of BMW, Volkswagen and Porsche. So why Tesla? The company’s presence threatens everything from local water supplies to democracy itself, she argues. “This is an existential problem.”
Their reasons for being here are partly ecological, partly anti-capitalist, explains Mara, twisting a piece of bark between dirt-encrusted fingernails. Tesla’s goal of producing one million electric cars per year in Germany does not serve the climate, says Mara. Instead, she describes the 300-acre Tesla factory as a byproduct of “green capitalism,” a plan by companies to appear environmentally friendly to persuade consumers to continue buying more products. “These companies completely made this up to achieve more growth even in a time of environmental crisis,” she said, adding that the protesters had no contact with Tesla.
For people like Mara, Tesla is a symbol of how the green transition failed, leaving the company’s German gigafactory the target of increasingly radical protests. The activists went into the forest in February to physically stop Tesla from clearing another 100 hectares of forest for its expansion. A month after the forest camp appeared, unknown saboteurs blew up a nearby power line, forcing the factory to close for a week. (A left-wing protest group called Vulkan, whose members are anonymous, claimed responsibility for the action.)