Walter Lange

by Elizabeth Doerr

In 1845, Walter Lange’s great-grandfather established not only one of the modern era’s most luxurious companies for making timepieces, but also the entire watchmaking industry in Glashütte. And while this may sound like ancient history, these roots are very pertinent to the modern incarnation of both the company A. Lange & Söhne and the city of Glashütte.

Glashütte doesn’t seem to be as important to anyone as Walter Lange. He was born into a veritable dynasty of inventor watchmakers—great-grandfather Ferdinand Adolph had the guts and gumption to save the Müglitz Valley from impoverishment with the idea of obtaining government aid to found a new industry. Great uncle Richard Lange is said to have discovered the formula for Nivarox hairsprings.

Walter Lange is a modest man despite his grand horological roots. “You don’t really feel it (being part of such a dynasty). It’s just a matter of course, something you have to deal with every day. You don’t notice it in a positive or a negative way,” he explains in his typically modest way, before drawing a comparison from his own life.

“In the early years, I traveled a lot. I had my case with hundreds of thousands of marks worth of watches in it, just doing my work. I carried this case with me right through downtown areas, but I was not ill at ease. You just do what you have to do and you don’t think about it.”

Watchmaker education

It never occurred to Lange to be anything but part of his family’s legacy and company. Watchmaking was such an integral part of Glashütte, where Lange spent his childhood and youth. However, his choice of watchmaking school was not a matter of course despite the fact that Glashütte was home to the most famous school of watchmaking in Germany, the German School of Watchmaking.

“We had a beautiful, wonderful school of watchmaking in Glashütte, but I couldn’t go there after beginning my apprenticeship,” Lange remembers. “Just as I would have been eligible, it was turned into a school only for master watchmaker candidates. So I went to Karlstein in Austria. My father (Rudolf Lange) had been talking to someone who he held for an expert,” Lange explains of how he came to study watchmaking in a foreign country.

The expert who had advised Lange’s father had also completed his watchmaker education in Karlstein, and so the little-known Austrian town came to play host to a Lange. “We had never heard of it. It seemed medieval in Karlstein, simply medieval. No running water, no paved roads, everything seemed a hundred years back.”

Though Lange found his education excellent, the conditions he experienced in the small Austrian town in 1939 remain with him to this day. “I guess we were spoiled in Glashütte; we had WCs and baths and such.”

In 1942, three weeks before his eighteenth birthday and before he was able to complete his watchmaker education in Karlstein, Walter Lange received his draft notice and had to leave the school.

In the fall of 1945, months after the end of World War II, the German School of Watchmaking in Glashütte re-opened and Lange was able to complete his formal education. Under renowned instructors such as Alfred Helwig, Lange made a marine chronometer and a school pocket watch featuring a gold-plated movement complete with gold chatons and a diamond endstone. He signed the movement “Walter Lange, Glashütte i Sa 1946.” The latter can still be viewed in A. Lange & Söhne’s showroom.

Love of Glashütte

Getting to know Walter Lange automatically involves understanding the love he has for his place of birth. He recalls that years later, after re-founding A. Lange & Söhne in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, someone dear to him often reminded him of this. “My business partner, Günter Blümlein, was sometimes tempted to say to me, ‘You are a citizen of Glashütte more than a representative of the company Lange.’”

Walter Lange only has good memories of Glashütte despite the rough times the small town (current population about 4,700) often went through.

“I had a very beautiful childhood. My parents never let on how bad things were sometimes. I was born during the Weimar era, and then there was the crash in 1929, followed by great unemployment. It remains to this day a childhood trauma for me to remember looking out the living room window of our historical family quarters at how all the unemployed lined up across the street, smoking and waiting. I will never forget that sight. And that was one of the main reasons I wanted to start again over there, to make sure Glashütte had enough work. I saw the same kind of unemployment heading toward Glashütte again.”