Life washed me on land on September 26th, 1964, and confronted me with a most important question 16 years later: ‚What are you going to do?'. My answer was: ‚watchmaker'.

Fate smiled and answered: ‚Ok, you're going to be toolmaker!'. Back then I could not understand this initial irritation, but meanwhile I'm very happy with this stroke of fate.

Because of this decision I now know the promise of university studies, worked independently and on my own responsibility as a draughtsman, developed machines and - along the way - could indulge to my passion: watchmaking!

5 years ago fate again knocked at my door to remind me on my former career aspiration. Fate thought that it is now time for realising a dream...

Draw circles of 500km radius around each of the capitols of the English, the German and the Swiss watchmaking traditions - there, where the circles nearly meet, there is the left lower Rhine, and there is also a place called ‚Nettetal'.

Apart from this - admittedly a little bit far-fetched - connection to watchmaking I do not know of a historical one. As far as I know there was no watchmaking tradition at the left lower Rhine.

But this is not important at all. Important is what I bear inside from the spirit of the old masters (whereever they lived), and what of this spirit is sensible in my current creations.

New ideas always originate from a mixture of tradition and individual deliberation. Both are important, and both have to be well balanced. Tradition alone produces plagiarisms, and the creations of people struck in the present often miss the soul.

It is this tightrope walk between the two worlds which make my creations unique. I could not do this at a place oozing with tradition - that is like with my own development. It gives me a distance necessary to step outside the tradition without completely leaving it. Something rarely found today.