1918 by Gregor Dallas

Author:Gregor Dallas
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448137954
Publisher: Random House

All of Rathenau’s subsequent writings are controlled by these ten thoughts. He told Count Harry Kessler on his return to Berlin that the private struggle within him since childhood was over, that he was going to retire from business and write. But he did not retire from business, and he did not begin a serious career in writing until five years later.

Two men lived on in Rathenau, and he could not escape the fact: Prussian and Jew, artist and businessman, mystic and scientist, a creative ‘soul’ struggling with a mechanical ‘intellect’. He wrote in opposites, thus sometimes giving the impression that his work was merely a series of arbitrary declarations – he expected the reader to make the connections. He relied, like an artist, on his intuition, and when contemplating the birth of the soul in the modern world he felt no need for proofs. What appealed to Germans in Rathenau’s books was their richness of imagery and their underlying message of hope. Rathenau was an impenitent optimist: things would get better.

Rathenau laid out his great scheme of human progress in a trilogy, consisting of Criticism of the Age (Zur Kritik der Zeit, 1912), on the current alienating process of ‘mechanization’, The Mechanism of the Mind (Zur Mechanik des Geistes, 1913), which described the rebirth of the people, and In Days to Come (Von kommenden Dingen, 1916), which focused on the society of the future.

The driving force in history, Rathenau was convinced, was the relentless growth of the world’s population. In order to meet the material needs of the people, the effectiveness of human labour had to be enormously increased. This was achieved through organization and technology, the basis of the ‘mechanization of the world’. Rathenau thus followed a logic diametrically opposed to that of the Revd Thomas Malthus, who a century earlier had advocated limiting population growth through abstinence. ‘The only country which has followed this route, France, is on the point of dying,’ noted Rathenau in 1912.67

Mechanization, he argued, brought about a revolution in every area of life – mental, social, economic and political. Even the human spirit was altered by specialization and abstraction: it was standardized; it was deprived of surprise and humour. The political state was transformed from a mystical power associated with religion to an armed confederacy for production. Economic organization came to dominate everything else. The power of the state was made subordinate to it. The creative soul of man was crushed in a society uniquely designed for consumption – the satisfaction of material needs.

Rathenau spoke of the globalization of this process, accompanied by an explosion of information. This did not enrich the soul: it impoverished it – images and ideas rushed past in an endless, roaring torrent. Very few of them took hold. Instead, man lost his intimacy with himself and became forgetful – he lost his history. Mechanical methods of work developed and more ‘jobs’ became available, but they were not the occupations of a craftsman. States became part of a world machine; they lost their identity.

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