Moritz Grossmann

Carl Moritz Grossmann was born in Dresden on March 27, 1826, and trained as a watchmaker between 1842 and 1854, a long itinerant apprenticeship that took him through some of Europe's leading watchmaking centers, including London and Paris. In 1854 he returned to Saxony and opened his own workshop in Glashütte, the small town in the Ore Mountains that, in those very years thanks to Ferdinand Adolph Lange, was becoming the heart of German precision watchmaking. His technical contribution earned him, in 1866, the first prize of the British Horological Institute for a treatise on the lever escapement, and in the same period he devoted increasing effort to public life in the community, representing the region in the Saxon Landtag.

The chapter for which Grossmann is still remembered today as a founding figure of German watchmaking is the creation, in 1878, of the Deutsche Uhrmacherschule of Glashütte, the watchmaking school that would train generations of master watchmakers and that in 1921 would attain the status of a specialized university-level institute. Grossmann died suddenly in Leipzig on January 23, 1885: his workshop was liquidated and the brand bearing his name remained dormant for over a century, while the school's pedagogical legacy continued to live on independently.

The name was revived on November 11, 2008, when Christine Hutter — a trained watchmaker with experience at leading manufactures such as A. Lange & Söhne — founded Grossmann Uhren GmbH in Glashütte, consciously reviving the historic name to turn it into an independent high-watchmaking manufacture. Under her leadership the modern brand develops movements entirely in-house, with a very high degree of vertical integration, and claims the motto "schönstes deutsches Handwerk" (the finest German craftsmanship) as its declared aesthetic and technical program.