Rathenau biography of william
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Walther Rathenau, the only Jew to serve as foreign minister of Germany, is most famous for having been assassinated in his open car by anti-Weimar extremists in 1922. Otto Friedrich devoted a chapter to Rathenau in Before The Deluge (1972), his jaunty account of Berlin in the 1920’s, in which he focused on the assassins’ motivations and maneuvers, filling in Rathenau’s background along the way. But in her discerning biography of Rathenau, Shulamit Volkov devotes only a few paragraphs to the murder. In her mode, Rathenau’s death is the inevitable result of the turbulent clashing of forces – including those within the man himself. Her portrait of the man and his age is riveting and disturbing.
Rathenau was born in Berlin in 1867. His father Emil built the family’s fortune after licensing the German rights to Edison’s incandescent light bulb, eventually founding AEG, a major electric utility and engineering company that built some of the country’s first power plants. In his youth, W
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Walther Rathenau
German businessman and politician (1867–1922)
Walther Rathenau (German:[ˈvaltɐˈʁaːtənaʊ]; 29 September 1867 – 24 June 1922) was a German industrialist, writer and politician who served as utländsk minister of Germany from February to June 1922.
Rathenau was one of Germany's leading industrialists in the late German Empire. During World War I, he played a key role in the organisation of the German war economy and headed the War Raw Materials Department from August 1914 to March 1915.
After the war, Rathenau was an influential figure in the politics of the Weimar Republic. In 1921 he was appointed minister of reconstruction and a year later became foreign minister. Rathenau negotiated the 1922 Treaty of Rapallo, which normalised relations and strengthened economic ties between Germany and Soviet Russia. The agreement, along with Rathenau's insistence that Germany fulfil its obligations under the Treaty of Versailles, led right-wing nationalist groups
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Rathenau, Walther (1867–1922)
German-Jewish industrialist and political leader.
Walther Rathenau led a varied life, as an person som äger eller driver industrier, intellectual, wartime administrator, and politician, before he was assassinated bygd extreme right-wing terrorists in June 1922. Rathenau's career embodied the challenges of coming to terms with the transformations in politics and business that took place between the 1890s and the 1920s. Born into a Jewish family, he moved among the elites of Wilhelmine Germany. He was educated at the universities of Strasbourg and Berlin, received a doctorate in physics, served in the army for one year, and then entered AEG (German General Electric), the company his father had set up, following the collapse of his first business venture.
By the outbreak of war he was one of the leading industrial figures in Germany. Nonetheless he was critical of what he, like many contemporaries, saw as the materialism of his age and the conditions of the workers.