In 1915 his father died, freeing him from a difficult relationship. He became chief organizer of the War Ministry's Raw Materials Department but, despite many accomplishments, resigned within eight months, deploring the bureaucratic morass and fearing the war's outcome. Rathenau's life and thought changed greatly after 1914. Faced with America's growing power, he urged Germany to take the lead in creating a European customs union. On the eve of World War I, Rathenau turned to foreign policy. His decision not to convert to Christianity frustrated his political ambitions but, as a highly successful businessman, he was a trusted consultant to leaders who valued his skills and overseas experience. With his elegant demeanor and wide circle of friends, Rathenau became prominent in Germany's mixed cultural and intellectual elite society. But four years later, in his essay 'Hear, O Israel,' Rathenau shocked his family and the public by attacking German Jewry as a 'foreign organism' within the German nation and an 'Asian horde' whose salvation required a 'complete metamorphosis'-not through anti-defamation campaigns, baptism, or Zionism but via Rathenau's ambitious path to acceptance by the majority. Rathenau's first article, published at age 26, after he had dutifully embarked on a business career under his father's tutelage, was a cautiously Nietzschean meditation on morality. In a complicating factor, Rathenau's bachelorhood denied him the social stability of his bourgeois peers and left him vulnerable to suspicions of homosexuality. An admirer of Prussian aristocratic traditions, Rathenau deeply resented his 'second-class' citizenship, which blocked him from a reserve officer's commission. Rathenau's privileged youth and education, although decidedly at the pinnacle of the social scale, were emblematic of Jewish advancement-and its limits-in imperial Germany. She has constructed a vivid portrait of an extraordinary life. Volkov, a professor at Tel Aviv University and author of several important works on German and German-Jewish history, has drawn extensively on the recently published Rathenau papers retrieved from the archives of the former Soviet Union and on a vast amount of primary and secondary literature. Shulamit Volkov's biography of Rathenau, Walther Rathenau: Weimar's Fallen Statesman, is part of Yale University's Jewish Lives series.

He was also a man of contradictions: outgoing and solitary, ambivalent about his Jewishness and German-ness, a technocrat who embraced spiritualism but advocated state regulation to achieve the common good. Born into a wealthy industrialist family that had disowned its Jewish beliefs and practices and gaining political office late in life, Rathenau was the quintessential outsider. Walther Rathenau was neither a typical German Jew nor a traditional German statesman.

The Genoa Conference by Carole Fink