His interest in the figure he likens to Walther Rathenau
, the businessman and liberal-democratic statesman who had been assassinated by right-wing nationalists in 1922, suggests that Schmitt saw in Musil's work a critique of liberalism similar to his own.
The last case study is a less obvious example of a projector--minister Walther Rathenau and his economic policy in Germany--who is also analyzed through the same theoretical lenses of the individual and his world projects.
The fourth chapter focuses on Walther Rathenau, the son of the founder of AEG and the sixth foreign minister of the Weimar Republic, who made the German Empire independent from world trade at the beginning of World War I.
And I do so on behalf of the people of Jordan who, every day, through their words and actions, demonstrate the values that defined the life of Walther Rathenau
This kind of redefinition went on in all the belligerent countries during and long after the war, and not only in the totalitarian regimes: every country had its Walther Rathenau
, ready to leap into this role.
Feldman identifies a combination of circumstances - failures in Germany's reparations negotiations, growing internal unrest, the murder of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau
in June 1922 - as having led to the final period of hyperinflation.
, Hermann Keyserling, Alfred Schuler).
They serve as an important contrast to the troubled lives of other prominent members of the Jewish elite, such as Walther Rathenau
and Gerson Bleichroder.
The principal victims were the Centre (Catholic) party parliamentarian Matthias Erzberger, who had signed the armistice agreement that signalled the country's catastrophic wartime defeat; Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann, the prime minister responsible for replacing the monarchy with a republic; and, most spectacularly, Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau
, a Jew whose policy of fulfilling the oppressive terms of the Versailles Treaty earned him the hatred of nationalists and anti-Semites alike.
Thomas Rink next discusses the question of "double loyalty," that is, the relationship between German and Jewish identity, in Fritz Rathenau, a cousin of the famous Walther Rathenau
In this context he discusses literary figures and well-known scholars, authors, and other historical figures: a whole chapter for example, is devoted to Joseph Roth, the proverbial pariah, who quite clearly enjoys the author's sympathy, whereas people such as Hans-Joachim Schoeps, Leo Baeck, Ernst Kantorowitz, Walther Rathenau
, and Theodor Herzl, quite indiscriminately denounced as parvenus, receive a good share of criticism.
On June 24, 1922, Germany's first (and only) Jewish foreign minister, Walther Rathenau
, was shot and murdered by two young right-wing former German officers.