Rathenau, Walther

(1867–1922)

   German industrialist, politician, writer, and statesman who served as the foreign minister of Germany during the Weimar Republic. Walther Rathenau was assassinated by an anti-Semitic ultranationalist, but prior to his murder, he anonymously published an article where he advised German Jews to avoid doing anything that might arouse scorn or ridicule on the part of their non-Jewish countrymen. “They should be careful,” he wrote, “not to make themselves a laughing stock by a slouching and indolent way of walking amid a race which has been raised and bred in a strictly military fashion. . . . In the meantime they should not try to look like ‘lean Anglo-Saxons.’ . . . They simply could not alter nature by wearing a sailor’s costume on the beach.” It was obvious to Rathenau that “two thousand years of misery have left marks too deep to be washed away by eau de cologne.” Years later, the Nazis used Rathenau’s article as evidence that even Jews admitted that differences between Aryans and non-Aryans were ineradicable.