Walter Lange

His father Rudolf ran the family company with his brothers; his grandfather was Emil Lange, and his great-grandfather the founder, Ferdinand Adolph Lange. As a boy he went round the workshops with his father in the evenings checking the day’s output.^1, 3

His birthplace is given as Glashütte in some accounts and as Dresden in others.^1, 3, 4

Set on becoming a watchmaker, from 1941 he attended the watchmaking school in Karlstein, Austria, until the war interrupted his studies.^1, 3

Bombs destroyed the company’s main building at the very end of the war in 1945. In 1948 the firm was expropriated in the Soviet zone, Lange left for the West, and the name vanished from watches for more than forty years.^{1, 2, 3, 4}

He settled in Pforzheim, long a centre of German jewellery making, where, as Watches By SJX describes it, he built a business distributing watches and clocks.^3, 4

When the Berlin Wall fell, Lange was in his mid-sixties and close to retiring. Instead he and the watch industry manager Günter Blümlein planned a new Lange manufacture, starting with no watches, staff, premises or machines.^1, 2, 4

They founded Lange Uhren GmbH in Glashütte on December 7, 1990, 145 years to the day after the original workshop opened, and showed the new company’s watches on October 24, 1994.^{2, 3, 4, 7}

With Blümlein running the business, Lange became the firm’s link to its family history. He stayed involved after it passed to Richemont, attending its trade-fair appearances as late as 2016, and published a memoir of his life.^3, 4

Death

Walter Lange died in January 2017. The company dedicated a watch to him whose movement number, L1924, refers to his birth year.^2, 3, 4