Foundation of the company archive
The role of the archive
Handing over the baton at St. Johann
Where the past meets the future
Handing over the baton at St. Johann
The company archive on the Novartis Campus in Basel.
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 History by the mile

Novartis has one of the oldest and largest company archives in Switzerland. Everything that was considered historically valuable or legally relevant at the predecessor companies Geigy, Ciba and Sandoz has been carefully indexed by numerous archivists since the 1950s. Nowadays it is not only the company that benefits from this “treasure trove.”

by Michael Mildner

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Advertisement for Ciba’s Binaca toothpaste from Niklaus Stoecklin, 1941.

arrow-rightFoundation of the company archive
arrow-rightThe role of the archive
arrow-rightHanding over the baton at St. Johann
arrow-rightWhere the past meets the future

When Hans-Peter Scheuner got on the train to Basel on the morning of March 7, 1996, he was in a good mood. Everything was going well for the 55-year-old translator, who had just signed a contract to work as a company archivist at Ciba and was due to start his new job in May.

But he got a surprise on the journey. “Everybody was talking about the merger of Ciba and Sandoz,” he remembers, “and I was of course worried about my new job when I heard about it. Indeed, this directly affected the archive.”

With hindsight, the merger would however prove a stroke of luck for Hans-Peter Scheuner and his team. Within the same year, he was appointed as the first overall manager of the Novartis Company Archive and, due to the additional work following the tie-up of the two companies, all staff members kept their jobs.

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Original ampoules from the 1920s with ergotamine, one of the oldest pharmacological substances still available in the company; labeled by Sandoz researcher Arthur Stoll.

Foun­da­ti­on of the com­pa­ny ar­chi­ve

When Scheuner resumed his post in May 1996, the archives of Ciba and Sandoz were still located on the opposite banks of the Rhine and the archive systems were organized in different ways. Furthermore, the two companies attached varying degrees of importance to their archives.

The Ciba archive was considerably larger than the one of Sandoz and contained more documents and items. This was also due to the fact that Ciba had already created an archive in 1953. It was created by J.R. Geigy A.G., which went on to merge with Ciba in 1970. The reason for the early creation of the archive was that five years before the 200-year anniversary of J.R.Geigy, which was founded in 1758, the authors of the company’s history noted that they lacked an archive from which they could obtain well-organized, reliable information. As a result, the decision was taken to pool all the documents, which had previously been dispersed throughout the company, in a single location and to index them systematically. The J.R. Geigy archive was also the first company archive in Basel’s chemical industry. Ciba and Sandoz followed soon after.

“Company anniversaries were also the impetus for the creation of a central archive at Ciba and Sandoz," said Hans-Peter Scheuner. "Ciba began to build up its archive in 1960, while Sandoz created the so-called factory archive in 1963 – the companies had recognized the value and significance of having a comprehensive, reliable source of information.”

When starting his job in 1996, ­Scheuner was in charge of miles and miles of documents that had been accumulated over the decades. The collection included items from J.R. Geigy A.G., Durand & Huguenin AG, Ciba Aktiengesellschaft, Sandoz AG, Ciba-Geigy and also the newly founded Novartis.

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Nobel Prize medal which Geigy researcher Paul Hermann Mueller was awarded in 1948 for the development of DDT.

The role of the ar­chi­ve

After the founding years, the various archives were built up and tended by a number of different archivists. At Sandoz, Marc Sieber was responsible for creating the first archive plan in 1963, while at Ciba, Erwin Zwigart looked after the historical documents for decades.

It is Zwigart who came up with a motto that still stands today: “The role of the company archive is to collect all types of documents that the company produces and to order, store and index them so they can be subsequently used. Internally, they can be used as evidence of a legal or historical nature, while externally they represent historical source material for telling the company’s story.”

However, Hans-Peter Scheuner now had also to focus on other issues after the merger. In 1998, together with his three-member team, which included Tanja Aenis, Head of the Sandoz Archive, he had to organize the move of the two archives to the Basel Rosental site.

At around the same time, representatives from the Bergier Commission were also frequent guests in the company archive. The commission’s historians, who were appointed by the Swiss Federal Council, had been carrying out research since 1996, studying the retention of dormant assets and analyzing trade relationships between Switzerland and Germany during the Second World War.

No sooner had this work been successfully completed the next move was being planned in 2001 as part of the gradual restructuring of the entire St. Johann site to create the Novartis Campus. The company archive finally found its new home on the fifth and sixth floors of a former dyestuffs factory.

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The Novartis Company Archive team, from left: Philipp Gafner, Carole Billod (now retired) Florence Wicker, Walter Dettwiler (Head).

Han­ding over the ba­ton at St. Jo­hann

The completion of this second move marked the end of an intensive and eventful period for Hans-Peter Scheuner, to which he still fondly looks back despite all the challenges he faced. When he retired in 2004, he handed over the leadership of the company archive to historian Walter Dettwiler, who joined the company in 2001.

As a passionate historian, Dettwiler likes to talk about the archive as the “living memory of the company,” which since the merger in 1996 has been affiliated with the Secretariat of the Board of Directors, currently headed by Charlotte Pamer-Wieser.

“The Novartis Company Archive currently occupies around 1,000 square meters,” explains Dettwiler, “and the few meters of documents from the early 1950s and 1960s have since grown to become miles and miles.” Although certain documents are now available in digital form, the physical archive still represents the heart of the collection, which must be protected against decay, damage and theft.

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Hans-Peter Scheuner, company archivist from 1996 to 2004.

Whe­re the past meets the fu­ture

The archive contains documents such as minutes from Board and Executive Committee meetings, building plans, historical photographs, films and objects, for example laboratory and office equipment, product packages or promotional gifts, some of which are also on display. The centerpiece of the collection is the Nobel Prize medal, which Geigy researcher Paul Hermann Mueller was awarded in 1948 for the development of DDT.

With his three-member team, Dettwiler also provides a services for internal and external stakeholders. “Each year, we respond to hundreds of queries, help people with research, assist employees who wish to have old documents archived by evaluating them in situ, and develop special offerings. This includes tours of the archive and exhibition concepts relating to the development of the St. Johann site or the history of the local pharmaceutical industry in the Basel Historical Muse-um,” explains the archivist, who spends the majority of his time inspecting and cataloging new material for the archive, retrieving documents from the historical treasure trove or ensuring the required documents are available for patent, legal or research inquiries.

However, the value of the company archive by far exceeds these material aspects. Being able to understand the past, whether it is an individual’s history or that of society or a company, is what creates an identity. And it is only by knowing your past that you can properly tackle the present and future.

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