GLASHUETTE, Germany (Reuters) - Like the intricate, fabulously complicated watches made by its skilled artisans, the former mining town of Glashuette in east Germany is a rarity.
In this picturesque setting, traditional watchmakers make timepieces so prized by connoisseurs that they can sell for nearly $500,000 -- making Glashuette a rare economic success story
Glashuette was at the heart of a watchmaking industry that rivaled Switzerland's until Russian bombers destroyed its main workshops on the day World War Two ended in Europe.
Forced nationalization of family-owned firms and 40 years of communism apparently buried what survived the Russians until the fall of the Berlin Wall sparked an unexpected revival fueled by a renaissance in demand for high-quality mechanical watches.
The gold and platinum watches now made by A. Lange & Soehne or Glashuette Original, the two top firms in the town near the Czech border, cost thousands of dollars and vie with Swiss masters such as Patek Philippe or Vacheron.
"They are really very beautiful watches," says Christian Pfeiffer-Belli, editor of specialist publication Klassik Uhren.
The two firms' success has encouraged others, such as Nomos, a new company making less-expensive watches with a distinctive look reminiscent of the 1920s Bauhaus school of design.
"(Glashuette) is a very, very German name," Pfeiffer-Belli says. "And it works very well in Germany because there are a lot of people who know Lange as a great brand from earlier times."
Around 800 people now work in the watchmaking trade in Glashuette in Saxony, a notable success in a region where large swathes of manufacturing industry have collapsed since German reunification in 1990.
And the outlook is healthy: a strengthening global economy, including an economic revival in brand-conscious Japan, has fueled demand for luxury goods since the start of this year.
PRICE OF A HOUSE
Glashuette's's remote location, in a beautiful wooded valley in the Erzgebirge region outside Dresden, is perfect for nurturing the special skills of the traditional watchmaker.
"You need to be calm and you need to be able to deal with very tricky problems," said Kerstin Richter, as she delicately turned a minute screw in a half-finished Lange watch.
The fantastic complexity of the clockwork mechanism and the precision of each tiny component is what attracts enthusiasts willing to pay the price of a house for a wristwatch that tells the time no better than a $10 electronic throw-away.
Lange's most complicated watch, the new Tourbograph, has over 1,000 components with features like a hair-thin transmission chain -- made of 633 individual parts -- to keep the torque generated by the watch's mainspring constant as it unwinds.
That, and the "tourbillon" -- a complex rotating component designed to counter the disruptive effect of gravity on the clockwork mechanism -- are considered the acme of the watchmaker's art and go some of the way to explain the Tourbograph's $447,500 price tag.
Even cheaper models cost thousands of euros and take months to complete. Connoisseurs, some now linked through Internet chat rooms, obsessively ponder their watch's finish or features such as the "double rattrapante" or "whiplash index adjuster."
MYSTIQUE AND HISTORY
As well as fine mechanics, the mystique of firms that produce only a few thousand watches a year has been decisive -- and that has its roots in the town's special tradition.
When Ferdinand Adolph Lange, a deeply religious man, founded Glashuette's first watchmaking firm in 1845, he trained local workers including basket weavers and laborers and laid great stress on fostering development of the then-impoverished region.
Over the next century, during which time Lange was followed by several other watchmaking dynasties, the town attained world renown, typified in 1898 when Kaiser Wilhelm II presented the Sultan of Turkey with a magnificent jeweled Lange watch now in the Topkapi museum in Istanbul.
Lange's great-grandson, Walter Lange, who picked his way through the rubble of his family's factory in May, 1945, has consciously built on the tradition since his return in 1990 with partner Guenter Bluemlein to relaunch the Lange brand.
Much of the success has been down to foreign investors -- both Lange, owned by luxury goods group Richemont and Glashuette, part of Swatch, are in Swiss hands.
But the technical skill of local craftsmen, kept alive during the communist era by the nationalized VEB Glashuetter Uhrenbetriebe (GUB), has also been decisive. GUB, which included nationalized Lange, sold cheap mechanical watches to the west for hard currency.
"The key to the revival was the period 1951-90," says Frank Mueller, president of Glashuette Original, the company that emerged when GUB was privatized again in 1990.
While the watchmaking industry in the west was devastated by the invention of the quartz watch, which allowed more accurate timekeeping at a fraction of the cost of mechanical watches, the east German industry was kept alive by state support.
"It was absolutely decisive that the knowledge and experience of these watchmakers wasn't lost," says Mueller.
In this picturesque setting, traditional watchmakers make timepieces so prized by connoisseurs that they can sell for nearly $500,000 -- making Glashuette a rare economic success story
Glashuette was at the heart of a watchmaking industry that rivaled Switzerland's until Russian bombers destroyed its main workshops on the day World War Two ended in Europe.
Forced nationalization of family-owned firms and 40 years of communism apparently buried what survived the Russians until the fall of the Berlin Wall sparked an unexpected revival fueled by a renaissance in demand for high-quality mechanical watches.
The gold and platinum watches now made by A. Lange & Soehne or Glashuette Original, the two top firms in the town near the Czech border, cost thousands of dollars and vie with Swiss masters such as Patek Philippe or Vacheron.
"They are really very beautiful watches," says Christian Pfeiffer-Belli, editor of specialist publication Klassik Uhren.
The two firms' success has encouraged others, such as Nomos, a new company making less-expensive watches with a distinctive look reminiscent of the 1920s Bauhaus school of design.
"(Glashuette) is a very, very German name," Pfeiffer-Belli says. "And it works very well in Germany because there are a lot of people who know Lange as a great brand from earlier times."
Around 800 people now work in the watchmaking trade in Glashuette in Saxony, a notable success in a region where large swathes of manufacturing industry have collapsed since German reunification in 1990.
And the outlook is healthy: a strengthening global economy, including an economic revival in brand-conscious Japan, has fueled demand for luxury goods since the start of this year.
PRICE OF A HOUSE
Glashuette's's remote location, in a beautiful wooded valley in the Erzgebirge region outside Dresden, is perfect for nurturing the special skills of the traditional watchmaker.
"You need to be calm and you need to be able to deal with very tricky problems," said Kerstin Richter, as she delicately turned a minute screw in a half-finished Lange watch.
The fantastic complexity of the clockwork mechanism and the precision of each tiny component is what attracts enthusiasts willing to pay the price of a house for a wristwatch that tells the time no better than a $10 electronic throw-away.
Lange's most complicated watch, the new Tourbograph, has over 1,000 components with features like a hair-thin transmission chain -- made of 633 individual parts -- to keep the torque generated by the watch's mainspring constant as it unwinds.
That, and the "tourbillon" -- a complex rotating component designed to counter the disruptive effect of gravity on the clockwork mechanism -- are considered the acme of the watchmaker's art and go some of the way to explain the Tourbograph's $447,500 price tag.
Even cheaper models cost thousands of euros and take months to complete. Connoisseurs, some now linked through Internet chat rooms, obsessively ponder their watch's finish or features such as the "double rattrapante" or "whiplash index adjuster."
MYSTIQUE AND HISTORY
As well as fine mechanics, the mystique of firms that produce only a few thousand watches a year has been decisive -- and that has its roots in the town's special tradition.
When Ferdinand Adolph Lange, a deeply religious man, founded Glashuette's first watchmaking firm in 1845, he trained local workers including basket weavers and laborers and laid great stress on fostering development of the then-impoverished region.
Over the next century, during which time Lange was followed by several other watchmaking dynasties, the town attained world renown, typified in 1898 when Kaiser Wilhelm II presented the Sultan of Turkey with a magnificent jeweled Lange watch now in the Topkapi museum in Istanbul.
Lange's great-grandson, Walter Lange, who picked his way through the rubble of his family's factory in May, 1945, has consciously built on the tradition since his return in 1990 with partner Guenter Bluemlein to relaunch the Lange brand.
Much of the success has been down to foreign investors -- both Lange, owned by luxury goods group Richemont and Glashuette, part of Swatch, are in Swiss hands.
But the technical skill of local craftsmen, kept alive during the communist era by the nationalized VEB Glashuetter Uhrenbetriebe (GUB), has also been decisive. GUB, which included nationalized Lange, sold cheap mechanical watches to the west for hard currency.
"The key to the revival was the period 1951-90," says Frank Mueller, president of Glashuette Original, the company that emerged when GUB was privatized again in 1990.
While the watchmaking industry in the west was devastated by the invention of the quartz watch, which allowed more accurate timekeeping at a fraction of the cost of mechanical watches, the east German industry was kept alive by state support.
"It was absolutely decisive that the knowledge and experience of these watchmakers wasn't lost," says Mueller.