Who was Walther Rathenau?

Walther Rathenau was one of the most important liberal foreign policy experts of the Twentieth Century. He was born in Berlin on September 29, 1867 to AEG founder Emil Rathenau. After receiving a PhD in Natural Sciences, Rathneau served a year of military service where he was denied a career as a military officer because he was Jewish. After this, he began his business career in Switzerland in 1892. In 1899 he joined the board of AEG and a few years later moved to the board of Berliner Handelsgesellschaft. At the end of the Nineteenth Century, he began to publish political essays and articles critical of culture – a path that was to lead him directly into politics.

At the beginning of the First World War, he was entrusted with tasks in the Prussian War Ministry. His real political career only beganafter the war when Rathenau joined the liberal DDP in 1918. In 1921, he became Minister of Reconstruction in the Weimar Republic, followed by his appointment as Foreign Minister in 1922. With the conclusion of the Treaty of Rapallo with the Soviet Union on the resumption of diplomatic relations and economic exchange, Rathenau achieved a major foreign policy success. As a liberal, he also focused on balance and diplomacy with the Western powers, with whom he enjoyed a strong reputation, and was diametrically opposed to the enemies of the first democracy on German soil. On June 24, 1922, Rathenau was assassinated by right-wing radicals in Berlin.