To avoid being sent to work in a uranium mine - a virtual death sentence at the time - Lange’s great-grandson Walter in 1948 fled Glashuette for the west, where he founded a company that distributed Swiss watches. The Lange brand, though, was mothballed for four decades. In 1990, Walter Lange returned to his ancestral home with Guenter Bluemlein, chairman of Swiss watchmakers IWC and Jaeger-LeCoultre, and together they revived the Lange & Soehne name.
Just like in the mid-19th century, a host of other watchmakers have sprung up around the company. Glashuette Original and Nomos Glashuette emerged in 1994, the year the resurrected Lange released its first wristwatches. In 2000, west German watchmaker Bruno Soehnle opened a factory in Glashuette to produce mid-range timepieces. And in 2008, a veteran of Lange relaunched the 19th-century Moritz Grossmann brand, which today produces about 200 watches a year that cost as much as 168,000 euros.
The sector employs almost 2,000 people, and Glashuette looks something like a high-end watch show. At one end of town the five-story building Lange completed last year spans the road. Across the train tracks, Moritz Grossman’s 40 employees work in a white concrete building that resembles an ocean liner. Farther up the steep hill overlooking the valley, jeweler Wempe makes high-end timepieces in a converted 1910 observatory. Small watch retailers dot the main street, a watch museum dominates the central square, and the town’s coat of arms depicts a clock dial.
The factories themselves are as clean as hospitals and as quiet as libraries. At Lange’s pristine facility, women in white lab coats hunch over desks, polishing pieces just a few millimeters long to a range of finishes. A few doors down, engravers peer into microscopes to etch floral designs on pieces of metal the size of a baby’s fingernail. In rooms sealed to ward off dust, the company’s dozens of watchmakers use tweezer-like tools to create timepieces out of hundreds of tiny components.
A century ago, “Glashuette was known as Germany’s watch mecca,” said Christine Hutter, CEO of Moritz Grossmann. “And today it has become that again.”