“Impressions”, by Glashütte Original 2026

It is always nice to receive an invitation to attend the presentation of new developments in the watch industry, but when a setting like the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in Madrid is added to that, things take on the feel of a capital event. And this is the case at hand: the book“Impressions”, by Glashütte Original, was the excuse to meet in such a temple of culture that, I must admit, I had never visited.

The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum houses a good number of works of German Expressionism, and it was precisely because of them that we were lucky enough to take a private mini-tour with Almudena Rodríguez, official guide of the Museum and true expert on the subject. Nolde, Kirchner, Münter (Kandisky's partner and later founder of Der Blaue Reiter) paraded before our eyes... although in reality it was we who paraded before them.

The link was clear: German artists to present other German artists. The master watchmakers from Glashütte in Saxony have many things to tell. From the mid-19th century, when Ferdinand A. Lange, from neighboring Dresden, laid the foundations of German watchmaking, to the current thriving industry, led byGlashütte Original, in turn heir to the G.U.B. (Glashütter UhrenBetriebe, Glashütte Watch Factory) which had supplied all the countries behind the “Iron Curtain” and was also famous for having manufactured fabulous marine chronometers – the most precise watches in the world – so much so that they were in production until the emergence of satellite navigation, at the end of the 1970s, made them permanently obsolete.

The book talks about this, and many more things.“Impressions”, by Glashütte Original. Divided into twelve chapters (Originality, Community, Excellence, Solidity, Creativity, Resistance, Flexibility, Beauty, Dedication, Balance and Tradition), each of them contains an article written by a group of experts and a story told by what is called a “friend of the brand” who deep down are – we are – fans of a way of doing things. A detail that catches my attention and that I personally appreciate: one of those friends of the brand is Marek Rusz, a prominent member of the German forum Watchlounge, a nod to the internet community.

The presentation was given by the president ofGlashütte Original, Yann Gamard (who we recently interviewed) who, with the passion that characterizes him, made it clear that this is an essential book in the library of any fan. Well edited, with large photographs and avoiding long paragraphs of text that could scare away a portion of readers who are not used to reading and are more inclined to watch (you know, the YouTube generation), it achieves a balance between tradition and modernity that could well be equated to the story it tells. To read in sips, with a good coffee.

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