Tutima Returns to Glashütte
The day the Berlin Wall fell, Dieter Delecate drove from Ganderkesee to Glashütte — the town where Tutima was born and dismantled. It took nineteen years, but he brought it back.
On November 9, 1989, Dieter Delecate got into his Mercedes and drove east. The Wall had fallen hours earlier. He did not call ahead. "I had to go," he said later. "I was Mr. Tutima."
He arrived in a town that looked like time had stopped in 1945. Houses were unpainted. Locals stared at his car. Delecate met the management of VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe, the state-run successor to everything the Soviets had reassembled after the war. But the meeting went nowhere. "I had my people in north Germany," he said. "Here they had a company based on the communist model with 2,000 employees."
Delecate knew what had been lost. In April 1945, Allied bombs hit Glashütte — Germany's watchmaking capital since 1845. The Soviet occupation forces dismantled what remained and shipped the machinery east. Ernst Kurtz, Tutima's founder, fled to Bavaria and rebuilt in Ganderkesee, a small town near Bremen. In 1954, a 19-year-old Dieter Delecate was hired by Kurtz as an apprentice. By 1960, Delecate had acquired the Tutima brand. He was 25.
For three decades, Delecate ran the company from Ganderkesee. Then, in 1994, he relaunched the Fliegerchronograph — a faithful reproduction of the 1941 original, powered by an ETA Caliber 7760. Die Welt ran it as a lead story. The photograph was the Tutima Flieger. In a decade dominated by quartz, a mechanical chronograph from Glashütte made front-page news. The watch became a symbol of the mechanical revival.
In 1998, Delecate's son Jörg became Geschäftsführer. The family began looking east again.
In 2005, a real estate agent drove the Delecates through Glashütte. On Altenberger Straße 6, a heritage-listed former railway building stood with a sign in the window: "I COULD BE YOURS." Delecate bought it.
On March 1, 2008, production began in the new Glashütte manufactory. Rolf Lang, a renowned Dresden watchmaker, served as the first operations manager. Three years later, on May 12, 2011, the manufactory was officially inaugurated — sixty-six years after the Soviets had dismantled the original.
Dieter Delecate spoke at the ceremony. "This day has a special meaning for me," he said. "A day full of past, present and future."
Today, Jörg Delecate runs the company with his sister Ute, who serves as Director of PR and Marketing. They are the third generation. Independent. Family-owned. Still in Glashütte.