Background
Rathenau was born in Berlin. His parents were Emil Rathenau and Mathilde Nachmann. His father was a prominent Jewish businessman and founder of the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft, an electrical engineering company.
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(This deeply informed biography of Walther Rathenau (1867–...)
This deeply informed biography of Walther Rathenau (1867–1922) tells of a man who—both thoroughly German and unabashedly Jewish—rose to leadership in the German War-Ministry Department during the First World War, and later to the exalted position of foreign minister in the early days of the Weimar Republic. His achievement was unprecedented—no Jew in Germany had ever attained such high political rank. But Rathenau’s success was marked by tragedy: within months he was assassinated by right-wing extremists seeking to destroy the newly formed Republic. Drawing on Rathenau’s papers and on a depth of knowledge of both modern German and German-Jewish history, Shulamit Volkov creates a finely drawn portrait of this complex man who struggled with his Jewish identity yet treasured his “otherness.” Volkov also places Rathenau in the dual context of Imperial and Weimar Germany and of Berlin’s financial and intellectual elite. Above all, she illuminates the complex social and psychological milieu of German Jewry in the period before Hitler’s rise to power.
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(Originally published in 1921. This volume from the Cornel...)
Originally published in 1921. This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies. All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume.
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Industrialist politician writer
Rathenau was born in Berlin. His parents were Emil Rathenau and Mathilde Nachmann. His father was a prominent Jewish businessman and founder of the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft, an electrical engineering company.
He studied physics, chemistry, and philosophy in Berlin and Strasbourg, and received a doctorate in physics in 1889 after studying under August Kundt. His German Jewish heritage and his assimilated wealth were both factors in establishing his deeply divisive reputation in German politics at a time of antisemitism among gentiles.
He summed up his feelings about growing up in Germany
I am a German of Jewish origin. My people are the German people, my home is German land, my belief is German belief, which stands above all denominations.
Reading Goethe, the greatest German poet was a national pride for the German. But more significant was the development of an independent-minded scientist and expert in "The Absorption of Light by Metals".
After an early career in the aluminum industry, Rathenau in 1899 joined the board of directors of the AEG; from 1902 until 1907 he led the banking consortium of the Berliner Handelsgesellschaft. He returned to the AEG in 1907, helping it to become Europe's largest electrical firm. Basically a philosopher, Rathenau shunned public life and never married. Above all, he was a strange mixture of contrasting influences; a fervent admirer of Prussian values, and yet a man of distinct Jewish consciousness; a capitalist who desired social reform; a wealthy entrepreneur more devoted to thought than to business; a monarchist who later embraced a democratic, republican state. The goal most dear to Rathenau was the assimilation of the Jews into the Wilhelmian state, which was, unfortunately, not to be. They were to remain second-class citizens.
On August 9, 1914, Rathenau discussed Germany's supply of raw materials with General Erich von Falkenhayn, the Prussian war minister, and shortly thereafter was appointed to head a new raw materials office within the Prussian War Ministry. Ably assisted, especially by Wichard von Moellen- dorff of the AEG, Rathenau convinced the Bavarian, Saxon, and Württemberg war ministries to inventory their stocks of vital war materials and to distribute them in an orderly manner to the firms requisitioning them. As the British naval blockade took effect, Rathenau convinced the Prussian War Ministry to establish a system of private stock companies (War Raw Materials Corporation) to buy, store, and distribute raw materials. Finally, in early December 1914, he was able to establish price ceilings upon certain items in order to prevent excessive war speculation.
Rathenau resigned his post on April 1, 1915, arguing that the new office was well established within the War Ministry and could run without a civilian head; it appears that army jealousy of civilian control as well as anti-Semitic sentiments also pressured him into resigning. The policies he had employed in requisitioning raw materials in Belgium and deploying Belgian forced labor in German industries were to cause him great difficulties with the Allies at a later date. In June 1915, after the death of his father, Rathenau was appointed president of the AEG.
Walther Rathenau had from the start felt that Germany would win the war, but that it would be a long one. Like Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, he foresaw the creation of a German-dominated Mitteleuropa after the war and as a result favored annexations in the west. Rathenau became firmly convinced that only General Erich Ludendorff could bring the struggle to a successful conclusion, but he never shared the first quartermaster general's wild annexationist schemes in the east. In time, Rathenau parted ways with Ludendorff over the issue of unrestricted submarine warfare, seeing therein the danger of America's entry into the war. In the summer of 1918 Rathenau promulgated a strange appeal to German youth to carry on the struggle; in September and October he sought a levee en masse to harness the last remaining forces to defend the homeland.
After November 1918, Rathenau worked to create a single, broad bourgeois political party, but in the end settled for membership in the German Democratic party. In 1919 he served as an expert during the peace discussions at Paris, and from May until October 1921 joined Chancellor Joseph Wirth's Cabinet as minister for national reconstruction. Rathenau basically endorsed the policy of fulfillment, hoping that German inability to meet the Allies' exorbitant demands would reveal the excessive nature of the demands made upon the Reich; he resigned when the major portion of Upper Silesia was turned over to Poland.
In February 1922, Rathenau rejoined Wirth's Cabinet as foreign minister, leading the German delegation to a reparations conference at Genoa. Rathenau became bitterly disappointed with Prime Minister David Lloyd George's refusal to scale down German reparations payments and, spurred on by Baron Argo von Maltzan, on April 16 signed a treaty with the Russians at Rapallo. A rumor that Lloyd George was conducting secret talks with the Russians precipitated Rathenau's willingness to abandon his basic pro-West stance and to come to terms with Moscow. At home, his reactionary opponents added the epithets "Bolshevik" and "Russian agent" to the existing ones of "Jew," "defeatist," and "traitor." He was murdered while on his way to work in Berlin on June 24, 1922, by two right radical officers. Perhaps more than any other, Rathenau's life and career show the pathos and tragedy of German Jewry from Bismarck to Hitler.
(This deeply informed biography of Walther Rathenau (1867–...)
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(Originally published in 1921. This volume from the Cornel...)
He supported Zionism.
Rathenau wrote about personal and social responsibility to the community at a time when solidarity was required to keep the peace. His characteristics were courage, vision, imagination, tenacity and creativity; yet he insisted technology come to the aid of manual labourers. So one of the joys of work included "pleasure from profit" to elevate society. Like World Zionism he identified a sense of inferiority with his Jewishness, he realised completely for the first time that he had come into this world as a second-class citizen and that no amount of ability and merit could ever free him from this condition.
One heavy criticism which he bore stoically was the implication that Jews could never put Germany first; that Jews were a problem for annihilation from the 1880s bore witness to the proliferation from 1880s of anti-Semitic parties. There were no Jewish officers in the whole Prussian Army - the ruling-class in the Imperial Officer Corps was both blatantly and latently anti-Semitic, eventually giving rise to the Nazis.
Rathenau wanted to stand on a platform for one world order for a transcendental peace that banished anarchy. After Versailles he founded a "League for Industry", an offshoot of internationalism that blamed German defeat on a lack of industrial readiness. he wished to exculpate the blame for Germany's war guilt articulated through an acquaintance with Colonel House