Under the dim glow of factory lamps, the venerable forge of Deutz extends its withered hand toward the new Promethean fire, a drone-winged armature that would have appalled the old smiths of Athens as surely as any iron went astray in the workshop of fate. The world’s oldest engine maker contemplates its own becoming, not in steam’s familiar breath but in the electric swarm and control electronics that breathe life into unmanned flight. Sobek Group, a propulsion craftsman rooted in Hirschberg, with three sanctuaries scattered from Baden-Württemberg to Hesse, stands to join this grim ascent. Seventy souls, a small chorus, laboring over drives and circuits that whisper through the air, a chorus now invited to sing for a defense unit hungry for ever more precise and cheaper wings.

The pact, said to close soon, is a line drawn in a ledger where the numbers speak the language of power. The deal’s price—roughly eleven times EBITDA—reads like a modern prophecy: power costs, and it costs a lot. The defense arm, a still-young segment that already yields a fraction of Deutz’s century-long memory, is forecast to deliver ten to twelve million euros of EBITDA in 2025. A multiplication of guineas for a multiplication of fears; a legal tender that only the hungry will savor, while the world debates whether any future is worth its toll. The unit’s revenue, described as still in the low-to-mid double digits, is a candle in a windy hall—bright, precarious, and necessary for the inheritance of a house that once thrived on the smoke and steam of industrial glory.

The numbers march on, cold and clinical: Deutz’s revenue last year near 1.8 billion euros, a testament to a lineage long enough to remember the thunder of coal and the ritual of the piston. Yet the mood of the marketplace is merciless and quick: the share price rose, a mere six percent, as if a fresh gust had blown through a cemetery of old certainties, lifting the veil for a moment from the long evening of Western manufacture. The announcement confirms what the era has already insinuated: defense is evolving with ruthless velocity, driven by new technologies and a calculus of warfare where drones are not merely tools but emissaries of a future that pretends progress is progress even as it gnaws at the last chords of restraint.

To speak thus is to hear the old sagas in a mechanized chorus. This is not the grace of Periclean military craft but the grim irony Nietzsche would recognize: the will to power wearing the uniform of science, the dream of mastery embedded inside metallic wings. It is the tragedy of a civilization that, long after having dethroned the gods, worships the engine that can unborn a world and recalibrate the border of mercy. The old craftsman’s virtue—precision, fidelity, endurance—becomes the engine that keeps at risk the borders of peace, now tethered to a market’s appetite for growth in a market of war.

And so we watch, not with triumph but with the quiet ache of cultural decline: a tradition that once taught restraint and the noble recognition of limits now partners in a calculus that treats violence as a growth vector, a sign of vitality. The drones rise, the numbers ascend, and the echo of classical restraint fades into the background hum of turbines and transistors. If tragedy is the shadow cast by the ascent of hubris, then this is no mere corporate maneuver, but a canto in which the old world—steel and smoke, oak and memory—is told to yield to a future that promises efficiency even as it erodes the very grounds on which civilization learned to endure.