This book has Berlin in the title and a date from a hundred years ago, but the story it tells is both older and very current, it takes place in Munich, Frankfurt and unfortunately ends only temporarily in the Hessian village of Istha. CDU politician Walther Lübcke died there in June 2019 by the shots of a right-wing extremist – like Walther Rathenau in Berlin a hundred years ago. At that time Rathenau, the liberal Jew, intellectual and business leader, was foreign minister of the Weimar Republic. Rathenau has little in common with the Hessian District Administrator Lübcke – except that both stood up for democracy and humanistic values. The continuity on the perpetrator side is all the clearer: right-wing extremists who pursue a criminal career in order to fight open society with terror and crime.
The book “Berlin, June 24, 1922” of the former mirror-Journalist Thomas Hüetlin reconstructs the history of the murder of Rathenau, and once you have started with this brilliantly told book, you read it through in one go. It tells of people who are no longer alive and known only to a few, but it affects the audience of 2022 directly. There is the coalition of the enemies of parliamentary democracy with their open hatred of representatives of politics, state and public life. There is the lateral thinker milieu that was already active in Weimar, also this insane inertia in the criminal prosecution of right-wing violence, the tendency to downplay the topic: individual cases, alcohol, confused young people. There is the fatal mechanism of blaming the victims for racist and anti-Semitic hostilities: If only they had integrated better! If only they weren’t so cheeky!
Hüetlin is stingy with good news. His book has a clear moral stance, but the picture that is drawn from there is nuanced. Anyone who has read Stephan Malinowski’s brilliant study “The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis” will feel reminded: Because Hüetlin now describes particularly vividly how Prussian militarism, especially the cadet institutions, function in the sense of the great brainwashing. Thanks to the writings of the violent criminal and later bestselling author Ernst von Salomon, he reconstructs this astonishing pleasure in violence. How does the military of the time manage to steal love from young men while making violence attractive, how is death sweeter than life?
Rathenau is not glorified. Hüetlin: “A complicated man!”
Hüetlin reconstructs the inner life, i.e. the thoughts, actions and relationships of the organization Consul – a right-wing terrorist group that emerged from the dissolved Freikorps. They forge big plans and fail again and again, bicker and make up again. And they commit murder and attempted murder. One, with the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann, then mayor of Kassel, fails miserably. Another, on former finance minister Erzberger, succeeds. And more are being prepared.
The murderer Ernst von Salomon is fascinated by Rathenau’s charisma. There is even an eerie encounter. Salomon attends a performance by Rathenau in the Volksbildungsheim in Frankfurt in October 1921. Because Rathenau seizes him, he decides that he has to murder the charismatic all the more. Such a person could find the way that leads Germany to peace and democracy. Exactly this junction should be blocked, because war is preferable to peace.
However, Walther Rathenau is not only viewed from the perspective from which his enemies and murderers saw him. We get to know him better: “A complicated man!” Rathenau had a difficult relationship with his demanding father, the founder of AEG. Later he, the Berlin Jew, developed anti-Semitic views. In his essay “Hear, Israel!” he mixes a whimsical indictment of German Jews with a paean to modern Prussia and recommends emphatic assimilation. Rathenau kept trying to connect with German circles, at the university and in the military. But anti-Semitism was already too deeply rooted in the Prussian bourgeoisie.
When Munch painted him, he got excited: “You become more like yourself than you are!”
The world of the Berlin avant-garde did not become his home either. He knew everyone and every Sunday he chauffeured the playwright Frank Wedekind through Potsdam. He appreciated the wild energy of the scene, but his aim was to channel it and steer it productively – he was the mastermind of an economically relevant synthesis of creative economy and industry. Edvard Munch, who was notorious at the time, was allowed to paint his portrait, but when it was finished Rathenau recognized himself in the picture as a “disgusting fellow”. Of course, that was more due to Munch’s giftedness. Rathenau found: “You become more similar than you are!”
Thomas Hüetlin: “Berlin, June 24, 1922. The Rathenau Murder and the Beginning of Right-Wing Terror in Germany”. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2022. 304 pages, 24 euros.
(Photo: Kiepenheuer & Witsch)
In Hüetlin’s book, Rathenau’s life is like a hallway with lots of doors that open onto hallways from which even more such doors branch off. He was against World War I at first, but then he helped where he could and used foul methods to minimize German casualties. Since he was unique and independent in every respect, he could not be called an opportunist who wanted to gain something for himself. Rather, he recognized quite soberly that he could do some things for the country better than other contemporaries. He was extremely hated by part of the population for this – a mixture of George Soros and Bill Gates in the eyes of today’s slobs.
Rathenau’s private life also offers endless mysteries. Most surprising is a homosexual love affair that he entered into shortly before his death. His friend was Wilhelm Schwaner, a right-wing, folkish writer of all things, in whose universe the swastika reigned supreme: “Two men around fifty, bald, both driven by lust that was difficult to tame!”
The trail of blood from indifference and trivialization leads to the present
Rathenau – this personally and politically involved and complicated figure – has no illusions about his end, despite the late love happiness. Like so many men of his era, he had wanted to become an officer so badly that the image of a sprightly pensioner feeding ducks didn’t quite fit. Rather, he was convinced that he would fall once and at the same time pave the way for a better future. Somehow it happened that way: Rathenau won, the right wing lost, but the path led through world war and mass murder of the Jews.
Thomas Hüetlin uses the fact that he doesn’t have a background in history and is trying out a new genre, the historical “True Crime” novel, in order to develop an appropriate, ambitious language. When the young men of the Freikorps rave about how they hunt down enemies naked in the forest, he sums it up: “Woodstock with a machine gun”. One looks at these actors with a clear and curious gaze, but understanding does not mean relativizing. For our time, the findings are clear: right-wing violence occurs in a climate of public hatred, especially when the parliamentary path to power is hopeless. The Lübcke murder, which itself stands in the blood trail of so many right-wing murders of less prominent people, is just another milestone.
And no: this “talking to the right” is useless.