We look at a noticeboard nearby with information about the town, places of interest – one of these is the ‘Oldtimer Museum’, devoted to old Saurer vehicles, open once a week on Wednesday afternoons. This little town seems to be proud of its history.
We find a place to stay and begin to explore the building complex down by the station. We start to walk around it. We spot our first Saurer vehicle, an old army truck rusting in a car park, and walk round the back of these vast wooden sheds. We later learn that part of this was another textiles factory, Heine, which Saurer took over. Saurer itself had started at the little village of St Georgen, just outside St Gallen, and then moved its textiles business here in 1853. But the greater part of these buildings would have been used for the vehicle manufacturing. Eventually we come across a modern complex, adjoining the old assembly sheds – the new Saurer:
There are three flags – the Swiss, the local canton and, curiously, the Indian flag, Gandhi’s symbol of liberation (we subsequently find out that Saurer now has substantial subsidiary companies based in India). We finish our circumnavigation of this complex at dusk – it’s surprisingly extensive, it’s taken us around forty minutes to walk around the perimeter. By the time we get back to the old town most of the restaurants have already finished serving, there’s a melancholic emptiness here, but eventually we find a place off the little square and get some soup. Afterwards we wander down to the lake, expecting to find a bar, but there isn’t anything. We sit on the wooden jetty looking over at the lights of southern Germany, remembering that mad tour of Beuys’ former colleagues we made more than a decade ago, hitching, sleeping by autobahn service stations when we couldn’t get lifts. J. reminds me of a lift we got with an Irishman chain-smoking joints and driving at 120 mph, which culminated in us smashing into the back of a Mercedes estate in the middle lane of the autobahn, and spinning wildly across three lanes of traffic, miraculously avoiding hitting anything else. Yes, that was certainly one of our nine lives gone …
But we also remember remarkable meetings with Johannes Stüttgen in Düsseldorf, with the political philosopher Rudolf Bahro in Augsburg, and with the pioneers of Volksentcheid, the movement for direct democracy – Wilfried Heidt and friends – just over the water there in Achberg. We’re still not tired so we walk round the lake shore and eventually we do find a bar, a rather brash place by a small marina. Over whisky and cigarettes we reflect on what we’ve learnt this evening, and again on how physically being in a place gives you so much that you could never glean from libraries or archives. Only by being on the ground here and walking can you appreciate the sheer scale of the company in relation to this place These factories and assembly sheds, in their heyday, would have covered a third of the entire area of Arbon – creating a kind of ‘Saurer Town’. What does such economic dominance do to the people reliant upon that company for work? How does it begin to affect, in numerous subtle ways, the whole culture of a community?
*
23 August 2000
Our pension is next to a church. Every quarter-hour throughout the night the bells rang, so we emerge this morning not in the best of moods. At breakfast we tell our host about the ‘bells problem’ – he seems rather amused but does agree to a change of room for this evening. Then we head for the town bookshop to get some local histories, on the way passing a model shop selling dozens of miniature Saurer vehicles. The man in the bookshop is very informative and tells us that over 3,000 people used to be employed at the vehicle plant, there was a huge fuss when it closed down in the early 1980s – most of the people in the town lost their jobs. Now only a fraction of that number remain, working on vehicle repairs. We discover that there are two distinct zones: the one at the heart of the old town, just under the castle walls, where the administrative headquarters have always been, and the one down by the station, where most of the manufacturing had taken place, mainly built in the 1920s – which we walked around last night.
We then head up towards the castle, and the administrative headquarters of the company, and suddenly I see something I never expected to see – coming down the hill towards us a working lorry with the unmistakeable Saurer logo on the front! I grab the camera and soon I’m snapping away like a crazed paparazzo.
The driver seems completely unfazed. J. goes up to talk to him – oh yes, there are many people who love these lorries. They may be twenty years old, but they’re so reliable, still going strong. Would we like to see the other one he has in his garage? An even earlier model, and we’re told to take a picture of the panel inside the door, apparently this is what lorry aficionados are most interested in.
Eventually we find the Saurer headquarters, a striking white art deco building of several storeys tucked down a lane beside the castle. Everything seems very sleepy in the August heat. We manage to access the downstairs lobby, and then climb up two flights of stairs and then along a corridor, nobody around. Finally we come upon two secretaries who seem surprised to see us. We explain we’re doing some research into the vehicle side of Saurer, can we talk to anyone? They say Herr Mickelson would be the person but he’s on vacation at the moment. What about other directors? No, nearly all of them are away. Then one of them says we could try talking to Herr Hess – he’s the man who runs the vehicle repair section down near the station. They ring him and it’s soon arranged, we can go down there straight away. On the way out we pick up copies of last year’s Saurer annual report. Outside we walk past a frieze celebrating the three generations of the company’s founders – Franz, Adolph and Hippolyt Saurer.
Herr Hess turns out to be a genial, moustachioed man in his fifties and tremendously knowledgeable and helpful about Saurer. He spends an hour or so taking us through the history of the company. It emerges that Saurer’s vehicles are a part of Swiss national identity – they supplied the post office, the army, construction industry, and at peak production in the 1960s they supplied over 50 per cent of the Swiss truck market, employing, at the peak of production, 4,500 local people. Their key strength was in niche markets, often designing, for very specific needs, relatively small runs of trucks. They also were adept at franchising and joint ventures with other vehicle manufacturers round the world, for instance they had partnerships with Vickers-Armstrongs and Leyland in England. Hess confirmed that Saurer stopped manufacturing vehicles in 1983, but as everything was done on a twenty-year guarantee basis, there are still a few workshops, like the one we’re in, which repair Saurer vehicles. At the end of our time, he proudly displays his drinks cabinet, branded under a sign that reads ‘Saurer / British Leyland’.
Herr Hess also gives us two detailed books on the history of Saurer, which we don’t have time to look at in detail yet because there are two museums we need to visit before they close. He has been delighted to talk to us, nobody has ever visited from Britain before, he presses other gifts on us before we leave – little Saurer lorry badges, a Saurer model truck, and even a Saurer ashtray and a Saurer cigar (which remains unsmoked in my flat to this day, in its silver and blue tube, proclaiming ‘30 Jahre Stark im Trend’) (‘Thirty Years On, Still Going Strong’) to celebrate a partnership between Mercedes-Benz and Saurer.