Rathenau, Walter

(1867–1922)

   German statesman. Rathenau succeeded his father, Emil, as head of the great AEG electricity trust and during World War I was put in charge of Germany’s war economy. He entered politics in 1918 at the head of the new Democratic Party. In 1922 he became minister of foreign affairs and negotiated the Treaty of Rapallo with Soviet Russia. He was assassinated by anti-Semitic nationalists in the same year. Rathenau wrote many works on philosophical and social questions. His attitude to Judaism was tortured and had elements of self-hatred. He rejected both Zionism and conversion as solutions to the Jewish problem and advocated an esoteric form of assimilation, although he despised the way many assimilated Jews aped their gentile compatriots. After Rathenau’s murder his mother, Mathilde, wrote a personal letter of forgiveness to the mother of one of the murderers.