Simply Abu Dhabi Magazine XXV

9 2 S I M P LY A B U DH A B I I t was a sad day for all during the 27th SIHH when it was announced that Walter Lange, A. Lange & Söhne Honorary Chairman, had died in Germany at the age of 92. The mood at the A. Lange & Söhne booth was of course very sombre and tinged with great sadness, but at the same time the spirit of the man lives on. Mr. Lange did a great job of instilling an indomitable drive into the company. The CEO Wilhelm Schmid said, “We must carry on in his spirit, as he would have expected.” The legacy of Walter Lange is quite remarkable. Here is a man who witnessed his family’s business razed to the ground in the aftermath of the SecondWorldWar, and waited for decades until he could resurrect the watchmaking company in 1990 after the fall of the BerlinWall. After a wait of nearly 50 years, Walter Lange helped bring about the first new A. Lange & Söhne watches in in 1994. Since then A. Lange & Söhne has proved time and again that German horology is every bit as impressive as Swiss. All of the novelties released at this year’s SIHHwere of the same exacting standard but here we will highlight arguably the best digital watch ever produced: the Zeitwerk. And now we have a stunning watch that also offers an acoustic time indication. The Zeitwerk Decimal Strike makes time audible in a new way: its striking mechanism sounds every ten minutes. The case of this timepiece, limited to an edition of 100, consists of honey gold as used exclusively by Lange. A. Lange & Söhne Z e i t w e r k D e c i m a l S t r i k e