Born in 1924 in Glashütte, Walter Lange is not troubled by what he might study or do in future, even as a schoolboy boarder – he wants to be a watchmaker! The son of Rudolf Lange, grandson of Emil and great-grandson of Ferdinand Adolph Lange is particularly happy as a young boy when he can spend the evening checking the day’s production with his father in the workshops. So, from 1941, Walter Lange attends the renowned watchmaking school in Karlstein in Austria’s Waldviertel region. Yet the same thing happens to him as it does to so many others of his generation: Nazism, war and occupation turn the life he had planned upside down.
The company’s main production building is destroyed in a bombing on the last night of the war in 1945. As Walter Lange completes his interrupted studies and the family attempts to make a fresh start, the expropriation in the Soviet-occupied zone takes place in 1948. The A. Lange & Söhne brand disappears.