A full century ago, Germany’s first Jewish foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, was assassinated by a far-right anti-Semite. Rathenau, the son of one of Germany’s richest men, was also the author of important works on philosophy, the director of one of its largest corporations, an influential journalist, and the inspiration for the character of Paul Arnheim in Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities. David Herman surveys his life and legacy:
Rathenau was the older son of Emil Rathenau, one of the great industrialists of late 19th-century Germany, founder of the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), Germany’s pre-eminent electrical-engineering company. . . . Walther Rathenau held senior posts in the Raw Materials Department of the War Ministry during the First World War and became chairman of AEG upon his father’s death in 1915. Appointed foreign minister in February 1922, he soon angered right-wing extremists by negotiating the Treaty of Rapallo with the Soviet Union.
When Rathenau was murdered, Kafka famously remarked that it was “incomprehensible that they should have let him live as long as that.” . . .
On the subject of Rathenau’s appointment as Germany’s first Jewish foreign minister, [his friend, the popular author Stefan] Zweig wrote, “He was fully aware of the twofold responsibility he bore because he was a Jew. There can have been few men in history who have taken on a challenge with so much skepticism and so full of inner misgivings, knowing that the problem could not be solved by him but only by time—and fully aware of the risk to him.”
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