Before there was a third generation, there were two. Before there was a Schmidt brothers business in Tehran or a refinery mandate in Brazil, there was a Frisian merchant town on the river Ems and a young man named Jakob Bruns Schmidt who would, in 1928, set down the first stone of everything that came after.
Leer sits in the East Frisian flatlands of north-western Germany, on the lower Ems. It is a Hanseatic-era merchant town, granted its market rights in the 1400s and known for a long tradition of shipping, harbour trade, dairy, and the careful, patient working hands of the Frisian people. Frisians are spoken of in Germany the way the Basques are spoken of in Spain: a small, unmistakable people, kept honest by the sea, who say less than they mean.
It is the town where Jakob Bruns Schmidt was born in 1901, and the town where, a generation later, his sons Bruno Schmidt and Bernd Dieter Schmidt would also be born.
The first Schmidt of this line was born into the Wilhelmine Reich and lived, in one lifetime, through the First World War as a boy, the Weimar Republic as a young man, the catastrophe of the Second World War as a father, and the post-war reconstruction as the patriarch of a working family. He chose, in the late 1920s — with the Bauhaus newly founded and Germany rebuilding itself out of ruin — to set up his own house.
That house was Jakob Schmidt & Söhne OHG. Founded 1928, in Niedersachsen, it grew into the largest local producer of concrete, asphalt, and the modular Bauhaus-period ready-mixed construction materials that paved a great deal of the region's post-war rebuilding. Jakob Bruns Schmidt ran his own retail shops in Niedersachsen for construction materials — a Frisian-merchant model of business: own the inventory, know the customer by name, deliver what was promised.
Through the late 1940s and 1950s, with the German economy rebuilding itself out of ruin, his two sons — by then young men — came into the business and helped him expand it into the form it would carry through the post-war Wirtschaftswunder. The firm was sold in the 1960s to one of Germany's largest construction-materials groups. Jakob Bruns Schmidt did not divest because the work had failed. He divested because he had built it as far as his generation could honestly take it, and because there were two sons ready to take the capital forward into a different kind of work. He had done his part of the work. That is the Frisian temperament.
Without Jakob, there is no Bruno and no Dieter. Without Bruno and Dieter, there is no Contex, and no Tehran, and no Riyadh, and no Moscow. Without all of them, there is no house standing on schmidt-sons.com to write these words. The first stone bears his name.
Two sons of the grandfather. Both born in Leer. The elder — Bruno Schmidt. The younger — Bernd Dieter Schmidt, born 21 April 1938. They grew up inside their father's business, in a family in which construction materials, retail, and the discipline of running an honest house were not concepts to be studied but the working air of the kitchen table. In the trade they came to be known simply as "the Schmidt brothers" — and, in the corridors that mattered, "the famous Schmidt brothers."
Their work came in three movements.
First, beside their father in Niedersachsen, they helped expand Jakob Schmidt & Söhne OHG through the post-war years — the Wirtschaftswunder — into the form that made the family one of the most established names in concrete, asphalt, and modular construction materials in northern Germany.
Second, when the time came to hand that work over, they helped their father sell the firm to one of Germany's largest construction-materials groups. The price of that sale was the seed capital of everything that followed.
Third, with that capital they did something German families of their kind did not often do: they took it out of Niedersachsen and into the Middle East. They built two firms there that the construction-machinery trade still remembers by name — Contex S.A. and Contimax. Together these companies grew into the largest construction-equipment export and after-sales-service operation in the region — four factories, twelve service centres, more than four thousand employees, and the exclusive representation of more than one hundred and eighty primarily German industrial manufacturers, including Wirtgen, Putzmeister, KABAG+Wiggert, Pascal, and FAUN. Cumulative sales from 1964 to 2000 exceeded thirty billion United States dollars.
The Schmidt brothers were not famous in the Western press of their era. They are famous in the working memory of the construction-machinery trade of the Middle East — the engineers, ministers, and family principals who knew that when a Schmidt brother put his name to a delivery, the delivery would come, on schedule, with the spare parts catalogued, and the service crew already on the plane.
They did this work for forty years, with a calm that the trade recognised as Frisian and as German at once. They did it together, in trust, until they handed over.
What is now Jakob Schmidt & Sons is not a new firm. It is the third generation of a single working line that runs from the 1928 cement and asphalt house in Niedersachsen, through the 1964 Middle-East machinery house, and into the present day — bitumen, refining, ventures, capital, advisory, ships, and the patient sovereign work that the third generation now leads from Moscow, Germany, Hungary, and the international perimeter.
The name on the door is the grandfather's. That is not nostalgia. It is the only honest accounting of where this work came from.
"Each generation inherits the part of the work the previous one left unfinished, and is judged by whether they left more or less to finish than they were given."
In Memoriam & in Gratitude
Jakob Bruns Schmidt · b. 1901, Leer
Bruno Schmidt · b. Leer
Bernd Dieter Schmidt · b. 21 April 1938, Leer
Three generations · one unbroken line