Walther Rathenau spurred forward the electrification of Imperial Germany, gained fame as an essayist, and became the first foreign minister of the Weimar Republic to achieve success in negotiations with foreign powers. Yet a nationalist secret society stalked and murdered him in June 1922, largely because he had the audacity to accept cabinet office despite his Jewish origins. Shulamit Volkov's succinct yet comprehensive “interpretive biography” appears in a series on “Jewish Lives” designed “to illuminate the imprint of eminent Jewish figures” on cultural and economic life in many countries (p. 242). The book is based entirely on published sources, but Volkov is well served by good scholarly editions of Rathenau's diary, voluminous personal correspondence, and essays.

Rathenau was obviously a restless, perhaps tormented soul, and Volkov provides superb insight into his inner conflicts regarding vocation, sexual orientation, and national identity. He sought from early boyhood to earn the respect and love of his emotionally distant father Emil, founder of the mammoth German General Electric Corporation (AEG). Walther displayed literary and artistic inclinations but slogged his way through to a doctorate in electrical physics and resolved to pursue a business career. When his letters home from his first job expressed loneliness and misery, his mother wrote him graciously that Emil would not be disappointed or angry if he became an artist, professor, or anything else that would make him happy. Walther regarded this letter as a sign of contempt and redoubled his efforts to succeed in business (pp. 35–37). For many years thereafter it was not quite clear to him or others how much his business success owed to his own efforts, and how much to his father's influence. When Emil died in 1915, Walther wrote a friend that “we discovered each other late, my father and I; first came respect, then friendship, finally love.” Only in death, Walther confessed, did he feel truly united with his father, “peaceful and confident in his presence” (pp. 131–32). As Volkov suggests, uncertainty about his father's esteem doubtless helps to explain why Rathenau so often expressed the feeling that his accomplishments were unappreciated and delivered ponderous lectures to friends to demonstrate his superior knowledge of any topic under discussion. Whether it also helps to explain Rathenau's decision to remain a bachelor remains unclear. Several contemporary observers suggested that Rathenau was homosexual, but Volkov can find no corroborating evidence. All that can be stated with confidence is that Rathenau's most sustained loving relationship with a woman, the young wife of a close business associate, almost undoubtedly remained platonic, and that he often rebuffed overtures from single women. Rathenau always hoped to play a role in public life, and Volkov concludes that regardless of whether he was homosexual or truly loved a married woman, he refused steadfastly to act on impulses that might provoke scandal and conflict.

Rathenau's greatest inner conflict involved his lifelong struggle to reconcile his dual identities as a patriotic German and a Jew. He always longed for complete integration into German social and political life but refused to undertake a hypocritical conversion to Christianity to increase his chances for acceptance; for him, Volkov concludes, “staying Jewish while climbing to the top of the social ladder was from the outset a matter of honor” (p. 50). Rathenau took no interest in Judaism, however, and declined every invitation to join a Jewish organization. His second published essay reflected the influence of antisemitic tracts when it denounced his fellow Jews for remaining in “a semivoluntary, invisible ghetto” and comprising “a foreign organism” in the German nation, “an Asian horde on the soil of the Mark Brandenburg” (pp. 45–46). Yet Rathenau compulsively emphasized his own Jewishness whenever he met new acquaintances. Only around 1912 did he argue confidently that Germany's discrimination against Jews represented a grave injustice, reflecting the dangerous refusal by the landed aristocracy to share power with talented commoners. Only in 1917 did Rathenau declare firmly, “I consider all race theories as a waste of time” (p. 144). Late in life Rathenau finally concluded that most German Jews were already patriotic citizens; he anticipated that the sufferings of the Great War would intensify antisemitism but faced the looming battle serenely after persuading himself that the accusations of the antisemites lacked any rational basis.

The first four chapters of this book are truly excellent, but the last three are somewhat disappointing, because Volkov remains interested primarily in Rathenau's inner emotional life rather than his budding political career. Rathenau's service as founder and head of the Raw Materials Office in the Prussian Ministry of War in 1914–1915, service that changed the course of German history, is treated in two short paragraphs (pp. 122–23). Thereafter Volkov writes four pages on his ambivalent feelings about the war and another five on his correspondence in these months with two obscure new friends who expressed admiration for his essays. Volkov writes nothing about the financial contributions by Rathenau personally and AEG to support liberal causes and very little about his contacts with liberal politicians. She also exaggerates the peculiarity of the essays in which he propounded a third path for Germany that would transcend the antithesis between socialism and capitalism. Volkov judges that these essays sabotaged Rathenau's political career, suggesting that he felt compelled to embrace “exceptional views” as “a compensation for prior subservience” to his father and the Imperial authorities (p. 162). She neglects the close similarity and mutual influences between Rathenau's ideas and those of Catholic social theory, the Evangelical Social Congress, the Society for Social Reform, Friedrich Naumann's National Social League, revisionist socialism, and the small Christian and liberal Hirsch-Duncker trade unions. During World War I Rathenau supported a wide variety of efforts to bring progressive businessmen together with moderate trade unionists, civil servants, and politicians, efforts that helped to lay the foundation for the “Weimar coalition” of 1919, but we learn nothing about that in this book. Volkov devotes one short paragraph to Rathenau's pivotal role in negotiating the Stinnes-Legien Agreement of November 1918, the historic peace treaty between big business and organized labor; one paragraph to his role in founding the German Democratic Party; and five pages to his distinguished service as foreign minister. The reader is left with the impression of Rathenau as a troubled loner, but he actually sailed within a very powerful current of progressive social thought and exerted great influence on the founding of the Weimar Republic. The subtitle of this book proclaims with good reason that Rathenau had developed into a true “statesman” by the end of his life, but the body of this book does not quite explain how.