Walther Rathenau: Weimar’s Fallen Statesman by Shulamit Volkov (review)

No figure in the history of the Weimar Republic was more enigmatic than Walther Rathenau. Rathenau was indeed, as the Israeli historian Shulamit Volkov puts it in this biography, a man of many talents: an industrialist and the director of one of Germany’s largest industrial corporations, a self-styled philosopher with a passionate interest in art and literature, a politician who rose to leadership in the German War Ministry Department during World War I and later to the position of foreign minister in the early years of the Weimar Republic—and a Jew. All of these different facets of Rathenau’s public and private life stood in an uneasy tension with each other. And it is this, more than anything else, that defines Rathenau as a “modern,” as a man whose own life and career encapsulated the uncertainties, the ambivalences and ambiguities, the unresolved paradoxes of the times in which he lived.

To be sure, Rathenau has attracted more than his share of biographers. But none has displayed greater sensitivity to the complexities, nuances, and contradictions of his character than Volkov. Her study of Rathenau is very much a personal—one might even say intimate—biography. She does not delve into the details of Rathenau’s political successes and failures but looks at Rathenau from the inside, so to speak: from the perspective of what he must have felt and thought. What emerges from this is a portrait of a deeply conflicted individual who vacillated between moments of depression and self-doubt, and periods of frenetic activity by which he sought to set aside those doubts through the sheer force of will. At the same time Rathenau was a profoundly lonely man who longed for intimacy but never quite succeeded in sustaining it in even his closest personal relationships. Volkov concedes, on the question of Rathenau’s sexuality, that although he was certainly attracted to men and actively sought their company, there is no evidence that any of these relationships went beyond exaggerated professions of affection consistent with the social conventions of the day. And whenever a relationship threatened to become too intimate, Rathenau would always draw back for fear that it might violate the boundaries of his own sense of self. This was particularly true in the case of the one woman to whom Rathenau seemed to have had a lasting attraction: Lily Deutsch, the wife of his father’s right-hand man, with whom Rathenau maintained a lifelong friendship despite his apparent coolness to her overtures when he was not yet forty. No less problematic was his on-again, off-again relationship with the famed publicist Maximilian Harden, a man so similar to Rathenau in temperament and interests that they could hardly help but be on opposite sides of many of the critical issues they faced.

As insightful as Volkov’s discussion of Rathenau’s personal relationships is, the heart of her study lies in its analysis of Rathenau’s status as a German Jew. It is here that Volkov draws upon a lifetime of scholarship on the history of German-Jewish relations to situate Rathenau in the broader context of the issues that she most recently explored in her book Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge, 2006). Although Rathenau was not raised in an observant Jewish family and never displayed much interest in Judaism as a religion, he experienced the stigma of what it meant to be a Jew during his year of service in the Prussian army and agonized over the question of his own Jewish identity before finally learning to affirm it proudly and defiantly—if not awkwardly—as he rose through the ranks of Germany’s business and political elites. At the same time Rathenau was no less proud and defiant in the affirmation of his German identity and saw no contradiction in being both German and Jewish despite the pervasive antisemitism of the late Second Empire and the dramatic...