Pre-Owned A. Lange & Sohne Saxonia Ultrathin 40990389/AS05805

Why We Love It

Two hands and nothing more.

For years that’s been the basest requirement of a dress watch. And for years — ever since the manufacture’s reestablishment in 1990 — no one has done dress watches as well as A. Lange & Söhne.

Still, the question of what makes a fine timepiece has befuddled collectors for decades. In watch collecting, particularly in the world of haute horlogerie, there’s the mistaken notion that a watch must be complicated to be considered a work of art. But sometimes there’s beauty in simplicity — not a stark, antiseptic kind of simplicity, but the kind of austere beauty that comes when watchmaking is distilled to its simplest elements.

The Saxonia Ultrathin is one such watch. At a perfectly modern 37mm in diameter, it consists of nothing more than a manually wound movement powering two thin hands around a simple dial. No date, no power reserve indicator — no seconds hand, even! (Who needs to time something to the second when decked out in white tie, after all?)

The example of the Saxonia we have here is in outstanding, lightly worn condition throughout. It features a 37mm case finished in 18K rose gold, a satin silver dial with applied rose gold indices, a matching alpha handset, and a signed brown alligator leather strap with a matching signed rose gold pin buckle (one of our favorites).

Finally, flip this beauty over and gaze through the sapphire case back at the incredibly finished, manually winding Calibre L093.1 movement within. Once you do, you can’t help but understand the Saxonia’s appeal.

We get it.

The A. Lange & Söhne Story

For Germany, Reunification represented a renaissance of sorts for a country that had been rent asunder by the Cold War. And for A. Lange & Söhne, whom fate had situated on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain, it was indeed a rebirth.

Lange was founded in Glashütte in 1845, and its first century was truly a golden age. The brand imbued its products with a care and an attention to detail that brought worldwide renown. Its pocket watches, in particular, gained high marks in competition and saw use on the railroads of Europe.

But the coming of World War II and the subsequent Soviet occupation saw that golden age come to an end. The Soviet authorities expropriated the company in 1948 — the factory was shuttered, and the once-shining name of A. Lange & Söhne nearly faded into obscurity. That is, until 1990, when Walter Lange — great-grandson of the founder, Ferdinand A. Lange — resurrected his family’s old company and brought it to prominence once more.

Armed with Ferdinand Lange’s journal, Walter Lange sketched a watch that would adapt his great-grandfather’s designs to modern tastes, while still keeping an eye firmly on tradition. In the journal, Walter discovered sketches of a clock that Ferdinand designed with his mentor Johann Gutkaes. Commissioned by the Elector of Saxony for the Semperoper House in Dresden, the “Five Minute Clock” was nothing short of revolutionary.

With legibility as their primary concern, Johann Gutkaes and Ferdinand Lange designed a clock that, with its rectangular construction and two counter-rotating drums — one to show the hours, the other the minutes — was essentially the world’s first digital clock. Over one hundred years later, it was that clock that would inspire the modern manufacture’s first watch post-Reunification.

In 1992, Walter Lange filed a patent for a big date window, similar in style to the clock in the opera house. Two years later, it would appear on the Lange 1. Without question the firm’s flagship model, it features a big date function as its hallmark. Though found in watches like the Zeitwerk or the Langematik Sax-O-Mat, it’s in the Lange 1 that the big date is used to the greatest effect. Alongside other details such as asymmetrical sub-dials depicting the hours and sub-seconds, and the A. Lange & Söhne signature with its famous ampersand, it shows a clarity of vision that is wholly Lange.

Subsequent models — no less innovative — have only further cemented the brand’s footing as one of the most refined and fascinating watchmakers in business today. From the ludicrously complicated Zeitwerk to the elegant Saxonia to the recent Odysseus dive watch, Lange & Söhne is committed to pushing the horological envelope and reestablishing Germany as foremost amongst the world’s centers of watchmaking innovation.