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Entrepreneur Hans-Jürgen Mühle: "Before the fall of the Wall, I would never have thought that I would ever run a private company again",
Photo: Jana Hemmersmeier / DER SPIEGEL
The individual parts of the movement measure only a fraction of a millimeter on the clean worktop.
The table lamp shines white like in a laboratory, so that the watchmakers from the Mühle-Glashütte company can see the finest grains of dust.
The movement must be manufactured to the thousandth of a millimeter so that it ticks evenly to the second.
The finished watch always goes a little bit ahead.
"I can't stand being late," says long-time managing director Hans-Jürgen Mühle.
When the 79-year-old leads visitors through production today, he no longer has to be punctual to the second.
He wears a wristwatch anyway: large square dial, leather strap.
Hans-Jürgen Mühle was managing director of the family company until it was expropriated in the GDR, then headed the state-owned company and finally founded a new company in reunified Germany: Mühle-Glashütte GmbH nautical instruments and precision mechanics.
"Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I would never have thought that I would ever run a private company again," says Mühle.
He had to start from scratch, with only two other engineers he first built ship clocks.
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