From Assimilation to Assassination

Title: From Assimilation to Assassination

Location: Berlin, Germany

Document: The New York Times

Time: June 1922

One June 24, 1922, at about eleven in the morning, [Walther] Rathenau — still firm in his refusal to accept a bodyguard — left his villa in Berlin and drove to the Foreign Ministry.…

At a turn of the wide Koenigsallee, his car was overtaken by an open vehicle. Several shots from automatic pistols were fired. Rathenau was hit in the chin and spinal cord and died before a doctor arrived.

Public agitation against Rathenau had increased since he had become foreign minister in February. The venerated General Erich Ludendorff, who was back in Germany after fleeing during the revolution and was active in extreme right-wing splinter groups, had sealed Rathenau’s fate by insinuating that “the Jewish prince” had sabotaged the war effort. The nationalist-conservative deputy Karl Helfferich had joined the attack on him in the Reichstag while, outside, rioters yelled in chorus: “Kill off Walther Rathenau, the greedy Jewish sow!”…

Though one of the conspirators, Erich von Salomon, later claimed the target had not been a Jew but rather a representative of the hated republic, the symbolic aspect was not limited to an attack on the republic; the assassination symbolized the crisis of assimilation.

—Amos Elon, The Pity of It All

Born into a wealthy secular Jewish family in Berlin, Walther Rathenau grew up with aspirations of assimilation for German Jewry. Walther served on the board of his father’s company, AEG — Germany’s largest producer of electricity and electrical equipment — and was an investor in or board member of more than 80 corporations.

The late 19th century offered great opportunity for German Jewry, but also saw a rise in anti-Semitism. Rathenau grappled with his own Jewish identity, and publicly called for assimilation as a solution for acceptance by German society. Rathenau had been humiliated when served in an elite regiment in the Prussian military and was denied an officer’s commission due to his Jewish identity.

He remarked, “For every German Jew, there is a painful moment he remembers his entire life: the moment he is first made fully conscious that he was born a second-class citizen. No ability and no achievement can free him from this.”

In 1897, when he was 30 years old, he penned a bizarre article in Die Zukunft, Berlin’s most popular political magazine, titled “Hear O Israel!” He proclaimed, “I wish to confess at the outset that I am a Jew,” before encouraging German Jews to have a more pleasant physical countenance. “Once you recognize the unshapely form of your bodies, the raised shoulders, the clumsy feet, the soft roundness of your forms, as signs of bodily decline, you will be able to start working for a couple of generations on your bodily rebirth.”