Glashütte after reunification

From 1951 the town’s watchmaking was one state company, VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe. From 1967 it was a works of the VEB Uhrenkombinat Ruhla, and from 1978 of the Kombinat Mikroelektronik Erfurt.^{1, 2, 8, 9}

The family names had gone with the private firms. A. Lange & Söhne was expropriated in 1948, and Walter Lange, the founder’s great-grandson, left for the West that year.^{4, 10, 11, 12}

The Berlin Wall opened on 9 November 1989. On 1 March 1990 the East German Council of Ministers under Hans Modrow decided to create the Treuhandanstalt, an agency to hold the people-owned enterprises in trust.^1, 3, 13

The Volkskammer’s Treuhand law of 17 June 1990, in force from 1 July, set privatisation as the aim: state enterprises were to become limited or joint-stock companies, and the combines were to be broken into smaller firms.^3, 13

Glashütte’s state works was entered in the commercial register on 16 October 1990 as Glashütter Uhrenbetrieb GmbH and placed under the Treuhand’s administration.^1, 2

Mühle-Glashütte says Hans-Jürgen Mühle and four colleagues were made managing directors in 1990 with the job of carrying the works over into the new economy.⁶

How deep the cut went is told two ways. Glashütte Original says the Treuhand sold most of the property and the rights to the A. Lange & Söhne name, and that only 72 of roughly 3,000 people employed around 1990 could be kept; the German Wikipedia gives about 2,500 employees near the end of East Germany and says the name rights went to IWC.^1, 2

On 7 December 1990, 145 years to the day after Ferdinand Adolph Lange opened his workshop, Walter Lange and the watch industry manager Günter Blümlein founded Lange Uhren GmbH in Glashütte, starting without watches, staff, premises or machines.^{4, 10, 11, 12}

In the same year Roland Schwertner founded NOMOS in the town, under a name taken from a watch brand of Glashütte’s past.^{5, 14, 15}

The old works was privatised in 1994, when Heinz W. Pfeifer and Alfred Wallner bought the scaled-down business and named it Glashütte Original, after an “Original Glashütte” seal of the 1920s.^1, 2, 14

Lange’s watches came back on 24 October 1994, a collection of four that included the Lange 1 with its outsize date.^{4, 11, 12, 16}

Hans-Jürgen Mühle left the works and on 1 April 1994 started Mühle-Glashütte GmbH nautische Instrumente und Feinmechanik with two employees, making marine chronometers; wristwatches followed in the middle of the decade.^6, 17

The rest of the old combine went the same way in pieces: Ruhla’s chronicle counts 26 firms sold to outside investors and 22 management buy-outs there.⁸

The Treuhand itself was dissolved on 31 December 1994. The Federal Agency for Civic Education counts more than 12,000 companies and units privatised or handed to local authorities and more than 3,700 closed, and puts the jobs in its firms at about 4.1 million in 1990 and about 1.5 million in the privatised companies at the end of 1994.^3, 13

Within six years both larger firms belonged to luxury groups: Richemont bought Les Manufactures Horlogères, the holding that owned most of Lange, and in October 2000 the Swatch Group bought Glashütter Uhrenbetrieb GmbH; those sales are told under The luxury-group consolidation.^{4, 18, 19}

Newcomers kept arriving. Moritz Grossmann was founded in 2008 under the name of a nineteenth-century maker, and Tutima, which had moved west after the war, opened a factory in the town the same year, as it dates it.^{20, 21, 22}

Who could put the town’s name on a dial became a legal question. NOMOS took Mühle-Glashütte to court in the 2000s over its Swiss movements, and a German regulation of 22 February 2022 now reserves the name for watches made in the area; see Origin labels.^{17, 23, 24}