During one of my visits to Berlin, I was hooked on looking for traces of Rathenau.

What does all this have to do with Brandenburg? To be honest, not much, but I wanted to go on a country trip to Freiewalde am Oderbruch, where Rathenau had his retreat.

 

If you continue to work on Rathenau afterwards, there is no way around Berlin. Since the story of this man is too important to me, I also went in search of traces in Berlin.

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Rathenau was an entrepreneur and politician, a person who was looking for solutions to the big questions in the Weimar Republic, above all to the solution of social questions, the self-alienation of people in a machine-made world, the unequal distribution of wealth, the protests to be paralyzed and uprisings, etc. Overcoming European anti-Semitism, which he saw in the assimilation of Jewish citizens as opposed to Zionism, was one of his themes, although he had found that he was denied a higher military rank precisely because he was a Jew , which led to the painful, lifelong realization that as a Jew he would remain a second-class person and that no ability, no merit could get him out of this situation.

The search for solutions that Rathenau wrote in books sometimes had utopian traits, which was not uncommon at the time. The problems were too big to be solved without utopias and visions. Rathenau had very far-reaching ideas, for example of a customs union in Central Europe, which he compared to a revival of the Frankish Empire, i.e. a connection between Germany and France. Above all, overcoming the Franco-German hereditary enmity was the goal behind these considerations. Nowadays no politician would argue with such historical dimensions, but ultimately this visionary idea is roughly comparable to the goal of pacifying Europe through the founding of today's EU.

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Rathenau was also an esthete who showed musical talent as a child, wrote plays and painted. He was probably more likely to be understood by his mother with this inclination. Rathenau always had an affinity for art. As a grown man, he was friends with, among others, Stefan Zweig and Gerhart Hauptmann.

The friendship between the socialist dramaturge Gerhart Hauptmann and the industrialist Rathenau was not unreasonable since Rathenau was a member of the German Democratic Party, a left-liberal party. Contacts with the two writers paved Rathenau's way to the Samuel Fischer Verlag, a publishing house whose importance for intellectual life in Germany at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century cannot be overestimated. Rathenau also published his writings in Fischer-Verlag.

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Rathenau would probably have preferred to become an artist or would have pursued a military or diplomatic career in order to escape from the family industrial business. But he bowed down and in 1893 joined the family business, Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft, or AEG for short, which was at times one of the largest electricity companies in the world.

After all, Rathenau had respectable artist friends and later he became Reich Foreign Minister, so art and diplomacy always had a certain place in his life. 

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His artistic interest was also noticeable in the company. For AEG, which had been founded by his father Emil Rathenau, the artist and architect Peter Behrens was found in 1907 as the "Artistic Advisory Board" - today one would say "Art Director", who gave the company a uniform design appearance that had a high has recognition value. This design was reflected in all the company's products, in pamphlets, posters, brochures, packaging, etc.

The work of the artistic advisory board is now referred to as "corporate design". Behrens was the developer of the first corporate design worldwide at AEG.

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The foreign policy that Rathenau represented as Reich Foreign Minister in the cabinet of Reich Chancellor Joseph Wirth was determined in those days by the outcome of the First World War, from a German perspective above all by the reparations payments dictated by the Versailles Treaty and Germany's downgrading to international insignificance. There were two basic positions on how to deal with it. Either you cooperated with the victorious powers or you didn't. But what options would there have been if you hadn't wanted to cooperate? But radical forces are not bothered by feasibility.

Rathenau first tried to continue the reparation payments as part of the so-called "policy of fulfillment", which was intended to make it clear to the victorious powers that their conditions were impossible. This approach led to accusations in right-wing circles that Rathenau was selling out Germany. Finally, the additional Dawes plan that was concluded with the Allies and that was supposed to be based on Germany's economic capacity for reparations claims, led to the payments being reorganized. But this treaty was also problematic because it did not reduce mass unemployment, it led to heavy dependence on the US economy, which experienced its Black Friday during the Great Depression of 1929, the Reichsbank and Deutsche Bank were placed under international control, etc.

Finally, Rathenau concluded the bilateral Treaty of Rapallo with the predecessor state of the later Soviet Union, the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, with which two states ostracized by international politics merged. For 

This was important to Germany, as its goods continued to be boycotted in Western Europe. Put simply, the goal was: technical know-how from Germany for natural resources from Russia. The Russians couldn't get hold of their mineral resources and couldn't process them without German technology, the Germans needed energy that they couldn't get from England and the USA.

The treaty was welcomed by a majority in Germany, but rejected by right-wing tendencies. They saw it as a rapprochement with Bolshevik Russia, and on top of that they only saw one Jew in Rathenau anyway.

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Lots of food for radical tendencies - and so it happened that Rathenau was shot dead by right-wing students in his cabriolet on June 24, 1922 at the age of 54 on the way to the Foreign Ministry not far from his villa in Berlin-Grunewald.

Rathenau's death triggered a political earthquake; millions of people came together in many cities, in the Berlin Lustgarten alone (between the palace, cathedral and old museum) two million people gathered to take part and to demand revenge and consequences.

Stefan Zweig experienced the moment when he found out that his friend had been murdered while on vacation on Sylt and described his perceptions in his novel "The World of Yesterday" as follows: "I was already in Westerland that day, hundreds and hundreds of spa guests bathed happily on the beach.A band played again, as on the day Franz Ferdinand's murder was announced, in front of carefree summer people, when the newspaper delivery men stormed the promenade like white petrels: "Walther Rathenau murdered!" and she shook the whole kingdom."

Stefan Zweig described this event as the beginning of the misfortune for Germany, for Europe.

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The two assassin students were quickly caught or killed, the problem was the organization Consul, which stood behind them, which had already murdered the politician Matthias Erzberger, who had signed the German document of surrender, Philipp Scheidemann, who on November 9th, 1918 died republic, narrowly survived an acid attack by the organization. 

The organization Consul was never really overturned, because it had discovered a gap in the young republic by taking on secret service tasks that were officially forbidden by the victorious powers, so that the republic also benefited from this organization, which actually despised everything republican . Eleven years later, in 1933, the members of this organization were incorporated into the SS.

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Rathenau was born in Berlin on September 29, 1867, the son of the industrialist Emil Rathenau and his wife Mathilde. He studied physics, in which he did his doctorate, chemistry, mechanical engineering, but also philosophy.

Rathenau was never married.