Walther Rathenau

An experienced journalist, Rathenau published in the Berliner Tageblatt an article accusing his own country of manipulating politics in Vienna. As the dual monarchy's relations with Russia drifted, the paper described a secret conspiracy at work in Moltke's War department in which he had taken part. During World War I his opinions hardened. He held senior posts in the Raw Materials Department of the War Ministry and became chairman of AEG upon his father's death in 1915. Rathenau played a key role in convincing the War Ministry to set up the War Raw Materials Department (Kriegsrohstoffabteilung, KRA), of which he was put in charge from August 1914 to March 1915 and established the fundamental policies and procedures. His senior staff were on loan from industry. The KRA focused on raw materials threatened by the British blockade, as well as supplies from occupied Belgium and France. It set prices and regulated the distribution to vital war industries. It began the development of Ersatzkaisertum raw materials, developing supply chains to bring peace and for regime change within Germany.[7] The KRA suffered many inefficiencies caused by the complexity and selfishness encountered from commerce, industry, and the government itself.[8]

Rathenau in 1921

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. According to one biographer he is said to have identified a sense of inferiority in society due to his Jewishness, writing that 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.[9]

One heavy criticism which he bore was the implication that Jews could never put Germany first; the idea that the Jews were "our misfortune", as the German nationalist historian Heinrich Treitschke wrote, led to the proliferation from 1880s of anti-Semitic parties.[lower-alpha 1] 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 supporting the Nazis' anti-Semitic policies.[10]

After Versailles (1919) 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.[11]

Rathenau was a moderate liberal in politics, and after World War I, he was one of the founders of the German Democratic Party (German: Deutsche Demokratische Partei, DDP), but he moved to the Left in the advent of post-war chaos. Passionate about rights of social equality, he rejected state ownership of industry and instead advocated greater worker participation in the management of companies.[12] His ideas were influential in postwar governments. He was put forward as a socialist candidate for first President; but on standing in the Reichstag was dismissed amid "rows and shrieks of laughter" which visibly upset the man. Ebert's election by the Left failed to heal the deep rifts and social divisions in German society that occurred throughout the Weimar. Rathenau advised that a small town in central Germany was the wrong place for the capital and seat of Government. But his own adequacy was under-appreciated; immediately giving rise to extreme right-wing organizations within months of the Communist-inspired Spartacist Revolt, "the product of a state in which for centuries no one has ruled who was not a member of, or a convert to military feudalism...," he told the Reichstag, at once deploring the foundation of the Fatherland Party in 1917.[13] In 1918 he established the ZAG living through his philosophy of Deutsche Gemeinwirtschaft a collective economic community.[14]

Rathenau encouraged free traders and believed in the efficacy of "preparedness and directional efficiency". AEG was influential: his colleague Wichard von Moellendorff was appointed as Undersecretary of the Reich Economy Office; for a time in July 1919 they worked closely for Weimar with republican Rudolf Wissell. But Hindenburg's technocratic rational economic Programme was borrowed; while Rathenau, being democratic, warned against short-termism. Berlin's March Days was a consequence of the internal struggle between Finance and Economic ministries. On 20 February 1919 he proposed workers councils. The plan for a Socialist League of nations was overtly pro-Union mocked as the "Paris League" – a throwback to the Second Communist International – they challenged openly for democratic ideas. But a rapprochement with Soviet Union was inspired by Rathenau; it tried to prevent an expansive 'Greater Germany'.

Rathenau was appointed Minister of Reconstruction and in May 1921 held a second meeting with Lloyd George and the Reparations Committee.[lower-alpha 2] He established good relations with Aristide Briand who praised "a strong, healthy, booming Germany". The era of Erfüllungspolitik was high, altruistic self-confidence; he shared a pre-war fascination for the Hegelian Complex for a corporate Germany chastised by a reverence to a Supreme Being. He was wary of allied decadence, complacent, corrosive of an innocent romanticism expanded into mysticism. His ideas were challenged as "objectively impossible"; Weimar lacked clarity and leadership, while Rathenau was deterministic, and robust over the details. A Levée en masse would be part of this utilitarianism that bestrode his Menschen philosophies. This contradistinction about an "unravelled" Versailles which was incompatible with Fulfillment and the role of Reconstruction.[15][16] Bravely Rathenau held out against the partition of Poland, despite Erzberger's assassination; and threats for extreme National Bolshevists when he joined Joseph Wirth's government after Cannes on 31 January 1922 led to a horrible fear that his days were numbered.

In 1922 he became Foreign Minister. Writing before the Genoa Conference that concern for his personal safety was prescient of a foreboding for his own death.[17] The insistence that Germany should fulfill its obligations under the Treaty of Versailles, but work for a revision of its terms, infuriated extreme German nationalists.[18] He also angered such extremists by negotiating the Treaty of Rapallo with the Soviet Union, which was signed on 16 April 1922, although the treaty implicitly recognized secret German–Soviet collaboration begun in 1921 that provided for the rearmament of Germany, including German-owned aircraft being manufactured in Russian territory.[19] The leaders of the (still obscure) National Socialist German Workers' Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, abbreviated NSDAP) and other extremist groups falsely claimed he was part of a "Jewish-Communist conspiracy," despite the fact that he was a liberal German nationalist who had bolstered the country's recent war effort. The British politician Robert Boothby wrote of him, "He was something that only a German Jew could simultaneously be: a prophet, a philosopher, a mystic, a writer, a statesman, an industrial magnate of the highest and greatest order, and the pioneer of what has become known as 'industrial rationalization'." Despite his desire for economic and political co-operation between Germany and the Soviet Union, Rathenau remained skeptical of the methods of the Soviets:[20]

We cannot use Russia's methods, as they only and at best prove that the economy of an agrarian nation can be leveled to the ground; Russia's thoughts are not our thoughts. They are, as it is in the spirit of the Russian city intelligentsia, unphilosophical, and highly dialectic; they are passionate logic based on unverified suppositions. They assume that a single good, the destruction of the capitalist class, weighs more than all other goods, and that poverty, dictatorship, terror and the fall of civilization must be accepted to secure this one good. Ten million people must die to free ten million people from the bourgeoisie is regarded as a harsh but necessary consequence. The Russian idea is compulsory happiness, in the same sense and with the same logic as the compulsory introduction of Christianity and the Inquisition.

The question of war reparations vexed Rathenau: Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles imposed repayments that would take Germany decades to repay. Expunging war guilt, converting it into financial and economic responsibility was critical to relations with the Big Four.[lower-alpha 3] Yet Rathenau was unable to convince Germans of its applicability. He talked in his "apocalyptic way about society, politics and the problems of responsibility."[21] He was persuasive; the Entente would recognise, he urged, that Germany had to be "capable of discharging its obligations."[22]

Although he never married, Rathenau did fall in love with Elisabeth 'Lili' Franziska Deutsch, (née Kahn), a society beauty and the wife of his father's business partner Felix Deutsch. She was the daughter of Bernhard and Emma Kahn (née Eberstadt) of Mannheim and the sister of, among others, composer Robert Kahn and Wall St. financier Otto Hermann Kahn.[23] He related in a notebook titled Brevarium Mysticum finding revealed love in the sight of a soaring eagle, a soulful dedication on a sojourn in the Harz Mountains. Walther was highly literate and intelligent, wrote several books with deep philosophical overtones. In Zur Kritik der Zeit contemporary human conditioning was critically examined on a sociological basis found in a life of business. This put together another critique into an intellectual context of 'mind over matter', social wisdom and corporate discipline as a framework in the socialistic sciences – Zur Mechanik des Geistes. Rathenau moved ever closer to a rejection of religion, embracing the power of science. He tried to bring people's attention to what changes would be required for a futuristic romantic movement in Von Kommenden Dingen to openly challenge the living of lives. Mechanistics rejected the central feature of Malthusian thoughts on human progress motivated by population growth. His focus was the importance of technology, rather than abstinence for standardisation, specialization and abstraction with positive approbation. The corollary for Rathenau of information-gathering was an exponential explosive growth in data that would enrich globalization. Rathenau delineated his arguments by dividing men into classifications: Mutmenschen and Furchtmenschen outlined the problems of mass migration across Europe which had resonance with the past. But he saw real significance for Zweckmenschen as utilitarian cunning to set the men of fear in motion. The philosophy amounted to Social Darwinism but there was an unaccredited presumption of delphic adoration for the Greek Parnassus.[24]

The theories of mechanization argued that competition could not go on forever as it died in love. Intellectual perorations were reached in pronouncements preceding a great vision for the future of German business. He cannot be directly held responsible for the mechanization of the Panzers movement, for his social idealism was grounded in Rousseau's Great Enlightenment Path. Pure mechanization would have to transmogrify psychological mutation, risk tragedy, and plunging into the abyss. Rathenau was assimilated by a love for St Francis Assisi, a message of service dedicated to the community that restricted his ambitions. A modified or applied mysticism, Rathenau's idea always expressed work as "a joy", and like Schopenhauer he rejected materialism and recognised its pitfalls, using a deep knowledge of technology to simultaneously warn of its dangers.[25] This distinction with Soviet working methods of dialectical materialism was unwelcome in a Germany seeking to rearm. Thus he rallied ideas for management and control as Head of Raw Materials and efficacy of science.[26]

• Berger, Stefan, Inventing the Nation: Germany London: Hodder, 2004.
• Dallas, Gregor (2000). 1918: War and Peace. London: John Murray..
• Felix, David (1971). Walther Rathenau and the Weimar Republic: The Politics of Reparations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-1-4214-3553-4.
• Gilbert, Sir Martin, The First World War: A Complete History (London, 1971)
• Henderson, W. O. (1951). "Walther Rathenau: A Pioneer of the Planned Economy". The Economic History Review. 4 (1): 98–108. doi:10.2307/2591660. ISSN 0013-0117.
• Himmer, Robert (1976). "Rathenau, Russia, and Rapallo". Central European History. 9 (2): 146–183. ISSN 0008-9389.
• Kessler, Harry (1969). Walther Rathenau : His Life and Work. New York: Fertig.
• Kollman, Eric C. (1952). "Walther Rathenau and German Foreign Policy: Thoughts and Actions". The Journal of Modern History. 24 (2): 127–142. ISSN 0022-2801.
• Pois, Robert A. "Walther Rathenau's Jewish Quandary," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (1968), Vol. 13, pp 120–131.
• Sabrow, Martin (1994). Der Rathenaumord. Rekonstruktion einer Verschwörung gegen die Republik von Weimar (in German). Munich: Oldenbourg. ISBN 978-3-486-64569-9. Retrieved 27 July 2012.
• Strachan, Hew, The First World War: Volume I: To Arms (2001) pp 1014–49 on Rathenau and KRA in the war
• Volkov, Shulamit (2012). Walther Rathenau: The Life of Weimar's Fallen Statesman. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-17847-0.
• Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, The German Empire 1871–1918 Leamington: Berg, 1985.
• Williamson, D. G. "Walther Rathenau and the K.R.A. August 1914 – March 1915," Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte (1978) Issue 11, pp. 118–136.

• Vossiche Zeitung – a newspaper
• Tagebuch 1907–22 (Düsseldorf, 1967)
• Count Harry Kessler, Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler (1918–1937) Grove Press, New York, (1999).
• W Rathenau, Die Mechanisierung der Welt (Fr.) (Paris 1972)
• W Rathenau, Schriften und Reden (Frankfurt-am-Main 1964)
• W Rathenau, The Sacrifice to the Eumenides (1913)
• Walter Rathenau: Industrialist, Banker, Intellectual, And Politician; Notes And Diaries 1907–1922. Hartmut P. von Strandmann (ed.), Hilary von Strandmann (translator). Clarendon Press, 528 pages, in English. October 1985. ISBN 978-0-19-822506-5 (hardcover).