Document KGy238XmBKVeoyZw5b3g6gdxo

FILE NAME: Eternit (ETER) DATE: 0000 DOC#: ETER006 DOCUMENT DESCRIPTION: Book Excerpt - Translation from German - with Cover Letter Kage 4 ot d [BEGIN:p. 49, line 10: On Decem ber 1 ,1 9 4 4 Max Graff began to work in the service of the St. Gallen [Switzerland] family of industrialists. To his am azement, he was allowed to begin his career (which ended up lasting 40 years with the same employer) with a month of paid vacation. oeYou have already passed your final exams and you have honestly earned your tim e off,aD explained Ernst Schmidheiny. aoeReport in a month to Director Stoffel in Niederurnen.ML] Stoffel, who had logged 40 years of loyal service to Eternit, received the newly hatched Doctor of Jurisprudence on a Monday morning and said, oelf you really want to make your career with Eternit, then you also have to know how asbestos-cement is produced.SD For a number of months G raf went on to work for a number of months in all the departments of the factory, hauled cement sacks, formed flowerpots, packed products for shipment, and shoveled asbestos in areas which were* completely* covered with dust and fibers. As such he shared the fate with all [authoraTMs italics] of EternitaTM s managers. aoel can also say, in any case, that I have never talked with anyone who didnTM t spend his probationary period on the production floor. And that includes Stephan Schmidheiny, who hauled around bags of asbestos in Brazil. ceAt that time nobody had any environmental consciousness, explained Max Graf. aceDust in this production process was, so to speak, a fact of nature.n In 1968, when G raf underwent a comprehensive medical examination, the doctor asked him whether he had ever worked in an industry which was a danger to his health; SceNo,D he responded, *almost without* ` thinking*. Today his negation of such an obvious health danger would be astonishing at the very least, because by 1968 in the United States, the idea of asbestos as a aoekiller fiberC! had already become part of the public awareness. END p.49, line 33]. 10/14/2004 rage o ot t> [BEGIN: p. 79, quote from Max Schmidheiny lines 1-6, ch. 10: ceEtemit Feels that it is not affected by the Asbestos Issue, aceTM And then it happened just like this in the sixties|l heard about Mr. Selikoff for the first time from Eternit Berlin. And they were saying, he is liar who spins tales who does research for which he is gets paid. W e have said that Eternit is not dangerous in any way, because the fibers are embedded in the cement. It is completely safe, *and* ` everything is fine*.TM Max Schmidheiny, autumn 1984aD END, p. 79, line 6] 10/14/2004 page i or b Dr. Barry Castieman_________________________________________________ From: To: Sent: Subject: 'The Bermans" <bermfarn@mcihispeed.net> <smschwarzer@ucdavis.edu>; <bcastleman@earthlink.net>; "Fernanda Giannasi" <fer.giannasi@terra.com.br> Wednesday, September 2 2 ,2 0 0 4 2:40 PM Dan Berman re; translation of ETERNIT: STEHAN SCHMIDHEINYS SCHWERES ERBE Hi Susanne: Thank you for your kind response. I making a few comments about your translation of p. 96, and you solved two problems I had troublewith. It's nice to be reassured that my German is fairly com petent,...I'm sure Barry and Fernanda and the others will be glad to hear that..... I think having you as an advisor for the hard passages will be perfect. But I won't abuse your time by asking you to look at everything I translate.....My one question is on page 94, the word "preicht"~it looks like some word from Swiss-german dialect; here's the whle sentence: "Stephan wre 'vielleicht auch Schriftsteller geworden, wen es mich nicht in eine Industriellen-Familie "preicht" h tte .'" So let's stay in contact, and maybe, little by little, we'll be able communicate the contents of this very interesting book to the English-reading world. Maybe we should try to get a contract to translate and publish it in English, but I don't really believe there would be such a large market..... W e'll be talking.....Dan -96- [I have never seen the word "absolved--in English we might say "graduated" or "finished". "Graduation" is for a degree course, such as a BA or P h .D .-b u t "graduation" is a bit too dignified for a little routine management course like this for an "important" person like Stephan Schmidheiny.... Instead he flew to South-Africa and there, he absolved [COM PLETED] a year of practical management training in the Everite company in 1973. During that time it suddenly [RATHER QUICKLY BECAME EVIDENT] became clear that Stefan would take over the "Etemit;" this [W HICH] had never been planned by the family council. In1974 he entered the Etemit as sales manager for Switzerland. The 27-year- old man could not enjoy his new position. For Max Schmidheiny did not have time himself, he sent his son to Sweden in order to inspect the situation. In retrospect the STS 10/14/2004 rage ot recognizes the eruption in Northern Europe as one of the first "big signals." In 1972 the communist fraction in the Swedish parliament demanded a total prohibition of asbestos, a ban, which, explicitly, should also apply to asbestos cement. This was a novelty because until then such demands had always been directed against the spray asbestos, the usage of which, by the way, had been prohibited that year in the USA. Schmidheiny's Eternit-holding operated as a pipe factory in Sweden, the Eternit-rr, which was directly threatened in its existence by the demands of the extreme Swedish left which were considered abstruse [FAR-FETCHED]. [Susanne: you did an excellent job with this sentence, which baffled me quite a b it].. Stefan Schmidheiny got onto a plane to Stockholm not sensing that what he was about to experience during one week in Sweden would impact all of his future "asbestos politics." In uninterrupted conferences with the management of Eternit-rr, and with union and government representatives he directly experienced how much explosive potential [good job here too!!] the fiber could have, upon which his future inheritance was founded. Today he judges: "Basically it was a power struggle between the socialist and communist parliament fraction, and the communists used asbestos to assert political pressure." However, he knew from the times of the student revolts of the university of Zurich, out of his very own personal experiences what the long march through the institutions truly meant for the left, [the "long march through the institutions" is what the Right in this country, Britain and around the world is doing... It smells very much like and what was entailed in becoming the object of political power struggles. In the turbulent year 1968, Stefan held a seat in the great student council- the parliament of the university- as a representative of the politically right oriented "Studentenring /circle of students/." [I looks as if S Sthmidheiny was a right-winger from the very beginning....]. He calls his key experience "Sweden shock," the actual beginning of his career as industrialist. Back in Switzerland he gathered those in charge and postulated with emphasis: "Gentlemen, what is happening up there, can happen elsewhere as well!" The son tried to impress on his father and his team of mangers, who had been fused together for decades, what was immanent. Max Schmidheiny and his proven comrades, who had built successful company holdings, expanding over four continents, and founded on Eternit, were incapable to comprehend the scope of the events in Sweden. */D ear Dan, H ead through your translation. Quit^good /**/J/**/^just three little^Kings w hipnl put in boldface: "corrjpletely" = fropriim e to timefldnissed "zpfweise" coraf^letely-it's ndt even in m /aictionary]; "almost withouUKinking"=sppmaneouslyTtfmow, but I Was making a ratnerfree in jeip retatio n jy^veryth in g is fine' - whichns indeed true/* */(you might have intentionally changed these words?)/* W erner Catrina, DER ETERNIT-REPORT-Stephan Schmidheinys schweres Erbe, Orel! 10/14/2004 Page 3 of 5 F 14 s s li, ZVirich, 1985, 245 pages{. Translations of selected pages into English, by Dan B erm ani p. 49, translation from ch. 8, oeMax Schmidheiny: the Great International Expansion,3n subheading: The "Right P e o p le d " quote from Max Graff, who began to work for the Schmidheiny family on Dec. 1 ,1944, in Swtzerland. He was a Doctor of Jurisprudence. Hallo Susanne: Here is a bit of translation I've done. Barry Castleman says that Stephan Schmidheiny has declined to speak with him until his legal cases are resolved, which could be forever. So there is really no hurry on the tranlation, so I have decided to do the translation little by little. Barry says that, especially if Bush wins this election, because of pro-corporate changes in the law affected 3rd party lawsuits, he may very well lose his source of income, so he says he cannot afford to pay for this translation (from which none of us will make any money in any case, since Schmidheiny is NO T being sued in a US courtm where it is possible to collect large, punitive damages. If you have a chance, however, perhaps you could evaluate this tiny bit of translation I did from the Germ an,,,m aybe, on a volunteer basis, could help with this, or do some translations which I could oversee and even perhaps rewrite. Best wishes, Dan Berman 10/14/2004