Walter Lange was born on 29 July 1924 in Dresden, the great-grandson of Ferdinand Adolph Lange and grandson of Emil Lange. He grew up around watchmaking; his family ran A. Lange & Söhne in Glashütte, and he was being trained to take over the firm when World War II interrupted everything. Walter served in the Wehrmacht during the war and was wounded at the Eastern Front; he returned to a Glashütte that had been bombed by Soviet forces on the last day of the war (8 May 1945) and was now under Soviet occupation.
In 1948 the GDR government nationalised A. Lange & Söhne along with all other Glashütte watchmaking firms, merging them into a state-owned conglomerate, VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe (the same entity that became Glashütte Original). The Lange name was effectively erased; family members were politically suspect and discouraged from leadership roles. Walter, then in his early twenties, fled across the inner-German border to West Germany rather than work as a state-employed watchmaker. He spent the next four decades in West German wholesale watch retail, watching from a distance as Glashütte deteriorated as an industrial backwater under socialist management.
"It would not have happened without him. The Lange name needed someone with the original blood. We could provide the money and the structure; only Walter could provide the legitimacy."- Günter Blümlein, on Walter Lange's role in the 1990 revival
When the Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989, Walter Lange was 65 years old and could have retired comfortably. Instead, within months of reunification, he had returned to Glashütte and assembled a small team. With the financial backing of Günter Blümlein, then CEO of IWC and the modern Mondaine group (and later founder of LMH which Richemont acquired), Walter re-registered A. Lange & Söhne on 7 December 1990, exactly 145 years after his great-grandfather's 1845 founding. The historical resonance was deliberate: the firm's identity rested on continuity, not on novelty.
For the next four years the new A. Lange & Söhne developed in secret. The brief from Walter and Blümlein was: produce watches that would have made Ferdinand Adolph Lange proud, and that nothing else in the modern Swiss catalogue resembled. The result was the 1994 launch event in Dresden, where four references were unveiled: the Lange 1 (the new flagship), the Saxonia, the Tourbillon Pour le Mérite, and the Arkade. The outsize date on the Lange 1, derived directly from the five-minute clock at the Dresden Semperoper that Ferdinand Lange's teacher Gutkaes had built in 1841, was the visual signature of the relaunch.
The 1994 launch was an extraordinary commercial success. Within five years A. Lange & Söhne was profitable, by 2000 it was widely regarded as a peer of Patek Philippe, and by 2010 the firm was selling roughly 5,500 watches per year at average prices above CHF 30,000, with a multi-year waitlist on the most desirable references. Richemont acquired the LMH holding company in 2000, and A. Lange & Söhne has been a Richemont brand ever since.
Walter Lange remained chairman until his retirement in 2009 and continued as honorary chairman until his death on 17 January 2017 in Stuttgart, aged 92. The firm marked his death with the 1815 "Homage to Walter Lange" reference 297.026, with a small subsidiary seconds dial and the dedication "In honor of Walter Lange" engraved on the caseback. The 145-year-old founding date he revived in 1990 is now embedded in the firm's identity; every modern Lange catalogue still references the "7 December" as the brand's anniversary.
