He comes from a 200-people village in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, where his parents had their own bakery and pastry shop in East Germany. Of course, his father would have preferred to see his son follow in his footsteps. But the years after the German reunification offered completely new opportunities to the young man. “Moreover,” Steffen Cornehl admits, “I did indeed want to work as a craftsman like my father, but I did not want to work on weekends.” The fact that the busy watchmaker now often has to do just that is probably fate. 

First, however, Steffen Cornehl becomes a retails salesman in Lüneburg. It is during his three-year apprenticeship with a jeweler that he gets hit with an idea: “When I saw the guys sitting in their workshop repairing clocks, I thought: They really like what they do, I want to try that, too.” Later, at the watchmaking school in Hamburg, it becomes apparent that he has the necessary talent for the delicate work: “For my profession, you need technical understanding – and you need a knack for it.”

Experience and intuition

Does Cornehl, who got an award from the Chamber of Crafts as an apprentice and in 2001 completed his master craftsman degree with honors, see himself as an artist, artisan or as a craftsman? He pauses for a moment: “I don’t really see myself as an artist, but our work definitely has artistic aspects.” What counts most when dealing with old clocks from the 18th and 19th century is experience, a certain feel for the art of watchmaking during this era and finally, the intuition of how to get these treasures up and running again. But no, he wouldn’t go as far as saying that old clocks have a soul.

What brought him to this almost endless and quite special field was his search for the extraordinary, says Cornehl. Repairing standard watches day in, day out did not appeal to him. In addition, the demand for the repair of wristwatches clearly has clearly decreased during this era of cellphones, tablets and smartphones.

So back to St. Petersburg,

where Steffen Cornehl is working again during these July days. During the initial years of the project, Cornehl and his colleagues went there in four groups of ten watchmakers – for two weeks every summer. And what are the much-quoted conditions? “Basically, we are working as volunteers. We pay our own flights, get modest accommodation in an old building of Peterhof Palace’s park and very good food,” says Cornehl. In addition, the guests from Germany are treated to an extensive cultural program – concerts, theater and ballet. But of course, their work on the rarities from Tsarist times takes priority, he emphasizes.

In one of the many buildings of the huge park, the German specialists have set up their workshop: “Everyone brought their own tools, because the historic watches cannot leave the country. If necessary, we bring spare parts from the West. Everything is handmade, we even have to manufacture many components ourselves because they don’t exist anywhere else – quite a laborious job that demands sophistication and resourcefulness.”