The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933 by Elon Amos

Author:Elon, Amos [Elon, Amos]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2013-04-25T18:30:00+00:00

Walther Rathenau. The pose in this painting by Edvard Munch suggests pride, power, and hauteur. By permission of the Maerkisches Museum, Berlin; Photo—Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin

Rathenau’s vocabulary reflected the fashionable terminology of social Darwinism. Jews were by nature a “people of fear,” Germans a “people of courage,” he claimed. And yet, Jews must beware of mere “mimicry”; they should truly become more like the German “species” in mind and body. Let them be not “sloppy” in appearance but “militarily robust” like the host people. And they must “consciously adopt the tribal qualities of the host country,” the behavioral patterns of the racially superior “tough, militarily bred” Prussian aristocracy. The result, Rathenau promised, would be a “moral metamorphosis.” Jews should also try to be less cosmopolitan, opined this most cosmopolitan of Jews; better if they had fewer international connections and fewer in-laws and cousins. “Despite their denials, [cosmopolitan German Jews] may be less at home in Paris, New York, or Budapest than in this country.” He who loves his fatherland “should be a bit chauvinistic.”32 The host people might then be more likely to recognize Jews as just another German tribe.

“Hear, O Israel!” caused a sensation. Rathenau’s father vainly tried to suppress it by buying up all the available copies. Many Jews were outraged. Rathenau himself soon wished that the text had never seen the light of day. He had written it, he later claimed, in a particularly depressing period of his life, in the dreary factory town of Bitterfeld. He left the essay out of his collected works. The fact that it was widely read and long remembered was due largely to the anti-Semites who continued to cite it approvingly. The Nazi historian Walter Frank lauded what he called Rathenau’s striking formulations. The völkisch ideologue Wilhelm Schwaner was deeply impressed and became Rathenau’s lifelong friend.

What seems to have particularly rankled Rathenau was his humiliation as a young recruit when, like other Jews, he was refused an officer’s commission in the elite Prussian regiment in which he completed his military service. (Military service was mandatory in Prussia, although university graduates served only one year.) Rathenau was discharged with the rank of a lowly lance corporal. “For every German Jew,” he wrote, “there is a painful moment that he remembers his entire life: the moment he is first made fully conscious [in the army?] that he was born a second-class citizen. No ability and no achievement can free him from this.”33 And indeed, his roles as industrialist, author, society figure, and artist could not compensate for his essential dissatisfaction. Besides heading the executive boards of almost eighty major enterprises and corporations, Rathenau painted, played the piano passably, wrote poetry and books on political, philosophical, and economic subjects. His intellectual ambitions grew over the years. Together with Martin Buber, Gustav Landauer, Gerhart Hauptmann, and other intellectual luminaries, both Christian and Jewish, in 1914 he founded an international club named after the Italian seaside resort of Forte dei Marmi. Under the more

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