Somewhere on the line, he said, someone had lost fingers, or a hand. But in order to activate the compression for stamping, he said, you had to have both of your hands on the outside of the machine. There was no way to accidentally bring the stamper down on your own hand or arm. To get one hand into the stamper, and bring the stamper down with your other hand, this required skill, he said. These accidents, which happened every few days, could only have been planned and deliberate. People started drinking schnapps at five a.m., he said, when their shift began. They drank schnapps all day long. By the time a worker decided to pull down the stamper with a single hand, having fitted his other arm into the machine, the magic moment when this worker was ready to sacrifice a functioning limb, he was good and drunk, René said, numbed up, and he would not feel much when the stamper swung down with great and smooth and unstoppable force, to crush his hand.
Why would someone do that? I asked.

“To buy an E-Class Mercedes,” René said, as if this were obvious. He sipped his beer. “With the compensation they give you, you can buy a nice car. Plus, you get a pension for life. You never have to work again.”

And this was what had activated him, he said. He had looked down the assembly line and thought, if sacrificing a perfectly good hand was an improvement, if that could elevate the quality of a man’s life, something was wrong.

The company was always angling to chip away break time, to lengthen shifts, to trim bonuses. The union pushed back. There were strikes. René started talking to the more political guys on the line, the strident ones. The radicals. He learned a lot. The union organized a work stoppage. It lasted a couple of weeks, and then Daimler fired everyone. By that point, he didn’t give a shit. He’d become a subversive.