Walther Rathenau (September 29 1867 - June 24 1922, assassinated) was a (Jewish) German industrialist and politician. He served as Reichsminister des Auswärtigen (Minister of Foreign Affairs) when he was assasinated in 1922. After World War I he concluded a rapprochement between Germany and Soviet Russia, and his assassination may have significantly influenced the long-term political and economic development of Europe.
Rathenau is thought to be the basis for the German industrialist character Arnheim in Robert Musil's novel The Man Without Qualities.
In spite of his desire for economic and political cooperation between Germany and Soviet Russia, Rathenau remained skeptical of the Russian Bolsheviks' methods. In his Kritik der dreifachen Revolution ("Critique of the triple revolution"), he noted:
- "We cannot use Russia's methods, as they only and at best prove that the economy of an agrarian nation can be leveled to the ground; Russia's thoughts are not our thoughts. They are, as it is in the spirit of the Russian city intelligence, unphilosophical and highly dialectic; they are passionate logic based on unverified suppositions. They assume that a single good, the destruction of the capitalist class, weighs more than all other goods, and that poverty, dictatorship, terror and the fall of civilization must be accepted to secure this one good. If ten million people must die to free ten million people from the bourgeoisie, then this is a harsh but necessary consequence. The Russian idea is compulsury happiness, in the same sense and with the same logic as the compulsory introduction of Christianity and the Inquisition." (p. 345 c.)
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