A Town’s Timely Revival
They took a licking--two world wars, a depression, Nazi despotism and Communist-era dispossession--but high-quality mechanical timepieces are once again ticking in this remote eastern German village where fine watchmaking began 156 years ago.
Two renowned watchmaking firms have reemerged in Glashuette after half a century’s absence, a serendipitous coincidence of dynastic destiny, investor insight and the return to vogue of hand-wound movements among connoisseurs and collectors.
Driven to right the historical injustices that sent his watchmaking family into western exile after World War II, Walter Lange returned to this Saxon hamlet a few weeks after Germany’s 1990 reunification to resurrect the legacy of his great-grandfather, the namesake founder of once-revered A. Lange & Soehne.
Four years later, the proud scion presented the first A. Lange & Soehne wristwatch in more than five decades, the Lange 1, at the annual watch fair in Basel, Switzerland.
“The whole industrial press of the world was talking about this watch. Here was this exquisite creation out of the Ossies [easterners] who had earlier produced the Trabi,” he says, referring to the much-ridiculed plastic-shelled Trabant compact car that symbolized Communist East Germany’s shabby production.
A. Lange & Soehne’s success in returning German watches to the ranks of esteem long monopolized by Swiss makers has lifted Glashuette, population 5,000, from the economic morass that was eastern Germany. But Glashuette’s Cinderella story is one with an uplifting twist: An ugly stepsister also has turned into a beauty.
Only a short walk from A. Lange & Soehne’s modern workshops are the spruced-up remains of the Glashuette Uhrenbetrieb. The factory was founded in 1951 by Soviet-trained preachers of “political re-education”--the euphemistically titled program for turning captains of industry into proletarians.
The company, known then and now by the less-than-mellifluous name of GUB, had been cobbled together from property seized from Walter Lange’s family and the six other local watchmakers and precision-instrument firms shortly after World War II. It mass-produced cheap quartz wristwatches under inefficient state management. It was nearly bankrupt after reunification when it was sold in 1994 by federal liquidators to Nuremberg businessman Heinz Pfeifer.
Pfeifer says he decided to buy GUB, despite its red ink and bloated work force of more than 2,000, because he saw its promise for “reviving a small jewel of German culture”--the high-quality watchmaking that ended in this country after the war.
“If six years ago you asked anyone where luxury watches were made, they would have said Switzerland, period,” Pfeifer notes.
“Now there are not just two German companies making exclusive watches, but they are both in the same small town,” he says proudly.
That tiny Glashuette is big enough for both is about the only common ground between Lange and Pfeifer, who have become passionate rivals. At issue is which company is the rightful successor to the town’s watchmaking founder, Ferdinand Adolph Lange.
“Fine German Watchmaking Since 1845” may refer to the first mechanical watches made here by Walter Lange’s great-grandfather, but it is now a legal trademark of GUB.
“It’s good that they are here,” Lange says diplomatically of the rival firm with title to his family history. “Competition keeps people on their toes at both places.”
Pfeifer likewise insists that the rivalry is inspiring, if not friendly.
“I don’t want cooperation from him but confrontation, because that’s what gives rise to creativity,” Pfeifer says.
Firms’ Rivalry Fuels Creativity
Creative tension between the companies does indeed seem to spur them. Both produce watches of such quality and reputation that they cannot meet demand and each sells only by special orders that take more than a year to fill.
A. Lange & Soehne, the latter word meaning “sons” in German, annually makes about 5,000 gold and platinum watches that start at more than $7,000 and range well into six figures. Glashuette Originals, as GUB’s products are known, include steel-cased wristwatches that begin at about $900 but ascend to nearly $150,000 for limited editions. Pfeifer declines to provide specific output figures for his company, but industry sources say it was more than 6,000 last year.
Pfeifer and Lange, who both live in western Germany, also share the successful executive’s acumen in recognizing the allure of their products as something beyond brand and function.
“Men like toys, and a mechanical watch is a marvelous and intricate toy,” Lange says with boyish enthusiasm, conceding that he seldom uses his chronometer for anything but checking the time. Most of the elaborate timepieces also have stopwatches, separate second-hand faces, timers, time zone alternatives--and some can even be used in navigation.
Says Pfeifer: “We sell emotions, not watches. A mechanical watch is really an anachronism, as quartz technology is more exact. But there’s something about them. They’re hip.”
The quartz crystal in an electronic watch provides a more accurate oscillator for keeping time than does the balance wheel of a mechanical watch. As with computer chips and microcircuits, mass production has cut the price of quartz crystals to make them far more affordable and broadly used than the handcrafted mechanical movements.
While A. Lange & Soehne is now ranked among the world’s top luxury watchmakers, company clock master Rolf Lang--no relation to the founding family--acknowledges that the firm suffers an identity problem abroad. The local watches are often mistaken for Swiss products, probably because both Lange and GUB are owned by Swiss-based conglomerates--Lange by the Richemont luxury goods group that also holds Jaeger-LeCoultre and IWC, and GUB by Swatch, parent firm of famous nameplates Breguet, Blancpain, Omega and Longines.
The Legacy of a Young Artisan
The story of Ferdinand Adolph Lange is told in the Clock Museum housed within GUB as well as in the showcase gallery of Walter Lange’s workshops. Both exhibits pay due homage to the young artisan who arrived in 1845 with a royal commission and 15 apprentices and within a few years established Glashuette as a European center of craftsmanship.
The founder, who went by his middle name and bestowed that initial on his namesake watches, passed the craft on to his sons, Richard and Emil. The latter in turn handed the reins to his three sons, Rudolf, Otto and Gerhard, who steered the business through the trying years of the Weimar Republic and World War II. Soviet soldiers looted what equipment survived the Allied bombing.
Although there was no direct political collaboration, as with almost all German production facilities, the watch- and instrument-making firms of Glashuette supplied the Third Reich with equipment during its campaign for world domination, which made even predominantly civilian industries Allied bombing targets.
Like other owners, the Langes were stripped of their property, and the 20-year-old Walter, Rudolf’s son, was about to be sent to work in uranium mines as his “political re-education.” He fled the Soviet sector in 1948 with nothing but a rucksack.
He settled in Pforzheim, a town in Baden-Wuerttemberg state famous before the war for its jewelers, but he was unable to practice his craft amid poverty and a new craze for quartz watches. Instead, he sold imported timepieces that kept him connected with the leading Swiss makers. His parents were allowed to join him in 1953. His father died barely a year later, Lange says, of the heartbreak of losing the family’s proud heritage.
Even as he has choreographed the return of his family business, Lange acknowledges that he has been more of a figurehead director, with the day-to-day work of running the international company done by associates such as Lang. Lange makes a point of never having spent a single night in Glashuette since 1990--an act of protest against the new, post-unification political system that refuses to restore even one of the 10 homes and apartments seized from his family.
“My family was dispossessed twice--the first time by the Communists and the second time by the German federal government,” he says. “And the second time was no less painful.”
Reunification treaties deemed all property seized during the 1945-49 Soviet occupation to be public assets to be sold at auction by a federal agency called Treuhand. Lange declined to take part in the 1994 auction in which Pfeifer bought GUB, saying he regarded the sale as a fencing of stolen goods.
“He could have bought this business from the Treuhand but chose instead to found his own,” Pfeifer notes defiantly in claiming that his firm is the rightful heir to Glashuette’s reputation. “But the real battle is at the cashier’s counter, not over history.”
Mechanical Timepieces Become Popular Again
Both firms attribute their success to the surge in popularity of mechanical watches in the late 1990s after decades of preference for the more precise quartz technology.
“Our customers want more than a watch. They want something that is beautiful and transcends time in the spirit of any work of art,” clock master Lang says. “A mechanical watch is a living thing. It moves and emits sounds and needs to be in sync with the wearer.”
While the watchmakers wage their battle for supremacy on the international stage, the inhabitants of Glashuette benefit from the companies’ presence whether they are employed there or not. Unlike the rest of former East Germany, where unemployment still hovers around 20%, almost everyone in Glashuette who wants a job has one, Mayor Frank Reichel says.
“It’s not important whether we can afford to buy the watches for which our town is famous but that they’ve found a market in the greater outside world, which allows us to make a living here again,” he says.
The two watchmakers employ only 400 people between them, but both companies are expanding and their income provides local tax revenue that has bankrolled state-of-the-art telecommunications and utilities, Reichel says.
“Before Walter Lange returned, this was a village without decent roads, and the water and gas lines were 100 years old,” Reichel says. Lange vividly recalls that 70% of the town’s homes then lacked indoor plumbing. “We still need a highway from Dresden if we want to attract tourists, as well as a hotel, but these things will come with time when there is enough demand to support them.”
Like the watchmaking magnates, Reichel says he has no fear of a global recession putting a halt to his town’s time in the limelight.
“Look at the history of another German luxury product, the Mercedes,” the mayor says. “There are always enough people who can afford the best.”
Employees at both firms count themselves lucky to have survived the political and economic upheavals of the past decade.
“I’m one of the few that was never laid off, and I realize how fortunate I am to have been spared that insecurity,” says Gert Bellman, who has been assembling movements at GUB for 40 years. His colleague at the same worktable, Karl-Heinz Reichardt, was jobless for seven years after a 1991 layoff and was called back only three years ago when his predecessor left to start his own business.
At Lange’s workshops, craftsmen such as Jan Slyva have been trained abroad in the art of restoring antique pocket watches made by the original company.
“I have to make most of the parts we need to fix the older watches like this one,” he says, displaying a nearly refurbished A. Lange & Soehne pocket watch from 1880. “No company produced parts for these for over 50 years. By doing so now, we have built a real bridge with our past.”
