Moritz Grossmann is a Glashütte watch manufacture that carries the name of one of the founding figures of German watchmaking. Carl Moritz Grossmann, born in Dresden in 1826, trained as a watchmaker and spent years as a journeyman in London, Hamburg, Paris, Stockholm, Copenhagen and La Chaux-de-Fonds before his friend Ferdinand Adolph Lange persuaded him to set up his own workshop in Glashütte in 1854. There he built pocket watches, pendulum clocks and precision instruments, won first prize from the British Horological Institute in 1866 for his treatise on the detached lever escapement, and in 1878 initiated the German School of Watchmaking. After his sudden death in 1885 the atelier was liquidated.
The name returned in 2008, when watchmaker Christine Hutter — whose career had taken her through Wempe, Maurice Lacroix, Glashütte Original and A. Lange & Söhne — secured the brand rights and, on 11 November, founded Grossmann Uhren GmbH in Glashütte with the backing of private watch enthusiasts. The first model of the new era, the BENU, followed in 2010, and the manufacture building on Uferstrasse 1 was inaugurated in 2013. The house describes its work as "Schönstes deutsches Handwerk" and says it is the only manufacture in Glashütte to make its own hands as well as its movements: steel hands filed, polished by hand and annealed to a brown-violet hue. Its dials are set to ten to two, the "smiling two".
The collection is split into two families. BENU covers the Heritage line — Power Reserve, Tourbillon, Hamatic, Tremblage, Corner Stone, Central Second, 37 Arabic and enamel-dial models — and the Contemporary line, with the Universalzeit world-time watch, Backpage, Date, Perpetual Calendar and GMT. TEFNUT is the ladies' family, from the Tefnut Lady and Tefnut Twist to jewellery pieces such as Arabian Nights and Sleeping Beauty. The calibres are made in-house, mostly hand-wound, with the Grossmann manual winder with pusher, the Grossmann balance beating at 18,000 vph, a micrometer screw on a cantilevered balance cock and a 2/3 plate in untreated German silver with Glashütte ribbing; the Hamatic adds a self-winding hammer system based on a 19th-century mechanism. Cases are in 750 rose or white gold and stainless steel, and many references are limited to a few pieces worldwide.
