The murder of Walter Rathenau

Judaism, Summer, 1995 by Carole Fink

Consequently, many contemporary observers Jewish and non-Jewish, were convinced of the heightened danger exposed by Rathenau's murder. The Austrian-Jewish economist, Gustav Stolper, lamented the "anti-Semitic plague" that had attacked the German body politic;(50) and the playwright Carl Zuckmayer insisted: "He was murdered because he was a Jew."(51) The London Jewish Chronicle reminded its readers that Rathenau had been "persecuted" since his appointment (June 30). The Nation, which termed Rathenau "one of the few statesmen whom Europe could not afford to lose" (July 5), also called him the victim of the Henry Fords who had preached against a "global Jewish conspiracy" (July 12). In August, The Contemporary Review called Rathenau a sacrifice to the "new anti-Semitism" wielding its new lethal weapons to exclude the Jews. The German-Jewish writer, Emil Ludwig, called Rathenau's "urge towards power" a fatal impulse in a land which had never permitted a Jew to hold the reins of State or had forgiven one who cherished that aspiration.(52) The Danish-Jewish literary critic, Georg Brandes, pinpointed the uniqueness of German anti-Semitism: in the Slavic lands there had been pogroms, mass killing, and mass plunder; while in the more "civilized" Reich single Jews were targeted for death.(53)

In August 1922, a Thuringian farmer assured his American train-mate that Rathenau had been killed simply "because he was a Jew." The trial of Rathenau's murderers confirmed that two of his assassins were fanatic anti-Semites who believed that they were eliminating a "pernicious influence," an "international Jew" who aimed to introduce bolshevism into Germany. Visitors to Germany in the summer of 1922 remarked that "everything but the weather was blamed on the Jews."(54)

Rathenau's death failed to kindle any spark of reconciliation between Germans and Jews. Brandes' caution about the peculiarity of German anti-Semitism remained valid. German Jewry, less than one percent of the population, more than ever feared to walk in Rathenau's footsteps and expose and endanger themselves. Walter Benjamin, in his anguished response to Rathenau's murder, wrote that the Jews could no longer hope to "speak" as Germans or even join the German "conversation."(55) And, just as important, the German people accepted, and in fact would expect, the Jews' almost total withdrawal from power. Walther Rathenau's great gamble -- to join the opposites of Weimar and Potsdam and to stretch the German Jewish relationship to its very extreme of acceptance -- had been defeated.(56)

The contrast with other states is instructive. French Jews had endured the Dreyfus Affair and American Jews the Leo Frank Affair as disturbing anomalies that did not diminish their sense of belonging to, or acceptance by, their homeland.(57) But for German Jews there was no redemption. After five decades of nonacceptance and vilification, they could not avoid concluding that the circumstances surrounding Rathenau's murder provided the verdict of their compatriots' "hate, delusion, and ingratitude."(58)