Walther Rathenau

He grew up in upper middle-class circumstances in Berlin, where he passed his high school diploma in 1884. In 1886 he began studying philosophy, physics and chemistry there, which he continued at the University of Strasbourg in the then annexed Alsace and completed his doctorate in electrical engineering in 1889. All Walther Rathenau's attempts to refuse to succeed his father in the "Allgemeine Electricity Company" (AEG), which had since been formed, initially failed. After Walther Rathenau had overseen the development of the electrochemical works in Bitterfeld and Rheinfelden, a branch of AEG, from 1893 to 1898, he joined the executive committees of AEG at the turn of the century. In 1912 he became a member of its supervisory board and in 1915 chairman of the supervisory board. At the same time, Walther Rathenau never gave up his political and philosophical inclinations. In addition to his entrepreneurial activity in the AEG, he distinguished himself through his first publications as a supporter of the bourgeois-liberal opposition to Wilhelminism. In 1915, when his father Felix Deutsch died, he took over the management of AEG, while Walther Rathenau made do with special powers and the formal title of president. In the course of the First World War, Walther Rathenau's political ambitions became more concrete, as he organized the distribution and provision of raw materials for armaments production in the Prussian War Ministry. After the war defeat and the November Revolution of 1918, Rathenau tried to form a bourgeois collective party. As a member of the German Democratic Party (DDP), he initially took an active role as an economic expert in shaping the first German democracy. In May 1921 he joined the government as Reconstruction Minister. In the same year he became involved for the first time as a foreign policy representative of the Weimar Republic towards France and Great Britain. In January 1922 he was able to achieve a reduction in German reparations payments at the Allied Conference in Cannes. On January 31, 1922, Walther Rathenau was appointed Foreign Minister. While he was unable to achieve success on the reparations issue at the subsequent World Economic Conference in Genoa, in April he succeeded in concluding the German-Soviet Treaty of Rapallo, which strengthened Germany's freedom of action in foreign policy. As his reputation grew abroad, he represented the interests of the young German republic against the victorious powers of 1918. The right-wing radical opponents of the Weimar Republic saw themselves provoked into an assassination attempt by the Foreign Minister's foreign policy policy and his Jewish origins. Walther Rathenau fell victim to this on June 24, 1922 on the street in Berlin-Grunewald. The perpetrators were 2 officers from the right-wing extremist organization Consul. In his writings, Rathenau warned against mechanization and materialistic thinking. He represented the idea of a society beyond capitalism and socialism that would liberate the working class from "hereditary servitude".