Thorsten Gröger, the regional leader of the IG Metall industrial union in Lower Saxony, where Volkswagen is headquartered, said that the company won’t be able to “overlook” the walkouts.

This time, I was visiting Saxony, the state in eastern Germany, called the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1949 to 1990. I was motivated to return by the country’s celebrations of centuries of ...