The Journey Begins

My journey into the world of watches began when I was just a boy. At that young and tender age, I spent a few weeks every summer with my great-grandparents. They lived in an old castle in Thuringia, Germany, which was renovated as a home for old people. In that beautiful estate, surrounded by a large park with ancient oak trees, I met one day another inhabitant of this place who had a curious hobby. His name was Edmund, and I can still see his face when I think back, and he collected watches. Now, he was an old gentleman, and it may have been just an old man's tick because he did not just collect watches that were working but also broken ones. Every summer I was down there, we went through his box and examined his new acquisitions as well as the old ones. For some reason, I found watches fascinating, and a fire was kindled that has never stopped burning to this day!

I don't really remember when I bought my first watch, but it must have been in my early teens. When I go through old photographs, I can see a watch on my arm early on. And here it becomes interesting. I grew up in East Germany, and there was not much variety when it came to watches. The main brand was "Ruhla", which was also the name of the town where the manufacturing took place. It was not the only watch manufacturing in the GDR! But all the others produced watches for export, mostly to western countries. It may surprise watch fans to know that today's super luxury brands like Glashütte Original,

Nomos, Lange und Söhne are all watch makers from East Germany! I will put in a link to

a piece on Chrono24 that details these facts a bit more. Let me just state that among the inmates of he GDR, nobody could obtain or even afford one of those watches. And even Ruhla produced mostly for the West German market. I learned recently that they even started making quartz watches in the 1970s. I never saw one while I was living there! When the wall came down and I had the opportunity to visit West Berlin, the first thing I bought was a gold-plated digital watch from Seiko and a Sony Walkman*, neither of which I could have purchased in the East!

From then on, my love for watches burned really hot, and to this day, I have purchased, owned, collected, and sold countless timepieces, and my desire for more is still very much alive!

I found this picture of an original Ruhla watch that I owned 40 years ago. I remember feeling kind of sad reading all those exotic names, from Anchorage to Sidney, knowing I'd never been able to visit those places.

Fortunately for us, things changed in 1989. But what kind of a cruel joke to release a world-timer watch to an imprisoned people!

https://www.chrono24.com/magazine/made-in-gdr-watch-brands-from-former-east-germany-p_62787/

*Walkman: for the young among us, that was our "iPod" back then. Just a tick bigger and it played cassette tapes! 🤣🤣