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

Walther Rathenau (1867–1922)—industrialist, intellectual, politician and prophet of modernity—is an endlessly fascinating and enigmatic figure about whom much has been written, the most prominent work being perhaps Harry Kessler’s 1928 biography (English translation 1929), which drew on sources lost in the Second World War. Since then, numerous biographies have been written, mostly in German, as well as a few biographical sketches in English. Shulamit Volkov, professor emerita of Tel Aviv University and much-noted scholar of German Jewish history, has written an outstanding yet accessible new short biography of the man and his times for the Yale series Jewish Lives.

Her book begins with Rathenau’s assassination in June 1922, an event that eerily foreshadowed the fate of German and European Jewry in the subsequent two decades, but Volkov is at pains to show that Rathenau’s life, complex and multifaceted as it was, does not lend itself to reduction into a simple tragic narrative. In the first chapter, Volkov offers a vivid picture of Rathenau’s family, their decidedly Jewish social milieu, and the broader German society into which they and many other German Jews sought assimilation. Born and raised in Berlin as the eldest son of the successful electrical industrialist Emil Rathenau, Walther grew up in privilege at a time of tremendous opportunity for Germany’s Jews. As a child, Walther grew very close to his mother and showed keen interest in the arts, something that would accompany him all of his life. Even so, Walther’s schooling, university studies, and apprenticeships prepared him well to step into his father’s footsteps. The Rathenaus maintained only tenuous contacts to the Jewish community; Walther was not Bar Mitzvahed, and later he allegedly only attended synagogue at Yom Kippur to say Kaddish for his father. As Volkov discusses in chapter 2, Rathenau even penned a piece early in his career, “Hear, O Israel” (1897), taking German Jewry to task for its failure to assimilate fully, revealing the extent to which Rathenau had himself internalized the pervasive cultural antisemitism of Imperial Germany. Yet despite the strong pressures to assimilate, Rathenau rejected conversion and never ceased identifying as a Jew. Volkov discusses the role that this and other early published writing played in connecting Rathenau with Maximilian Harden, publisher of Die Zukunft and himself a converted Jew, who would introduce Rathenau to an elite cultural circle that included Gerhard Hauptmann, Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, Harry Kessler, Max Reinhardt, Frank Wedekind, and Stefan Zweig.

Rathenau, while very much a lonely figure who never married, was capable of very intense friendships with both men and women—in addition to Harden, Constantin Brunner, Wilhelm Schwaner, Lili Deutsch and Fanny Künstler, among others. Nevertheless, it is very much to Professor Volkov’s credit that she does not add to the speculation about Rathenau’s sexuality, an issue that cannot be resolved from the surviving sources. Instead, she focuses on the complex intersection of Rathenau’s own religious-philosophical views, developments in the German industrial economy, and the cultural critique of modernity en vogue in Germany at the time, revealing how these various threads came together in Rathenau’s writings and in his political aspirations. Rathenau achieved literary celebrity for the first time through his book Critique of the Times (1912), which was prophetic for its insights about the impact of mechanized industry on society and its values. As a prominent industrialist, Rathenau also developed close contacts to Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow and the Colonial Secretary Bernhard Dernburg (himself of Jewish ancestry), accompanying the latter on a tour of the German African colonies in 1907. Yet Rathenau’s ties to Harden, an unsparing critic of Kaiser Wilhelm and his entourage (and likely also Rathenau’s Jewishness), blocked his political aspirations before the war. This led to Rathenau’s increasing embitterment over what he viewed as Germany’s “semi-parliamentary” development, which he saw hindering men of talent so urgently needed as Germany navigated the dangerous shoals...