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Walther Rathenau is best known as Weimar Germany's foreign minister, murdered in full daylight on June 24, 1922, while riding in his open-roof coupe along the elegant Königsallee in Grunewald, Berlin-West.1 Some also identify him as the son of Emil Rathenau—that famous Generaldirektor of the pioneering electrical concern, the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG)—and eventually an industrial baron in his own right, surely in his generation among Germany's wealthiest and most powerful businessmen. The attitude of this highly assimilated Jew towards his co-religionists, publicly criticizing them for what he considered their foreign looks and foreign manners, was often considered paradigmatic for that famous or rather infamous Jewish self-hate, not unknown among other outstanding German Jews at the time, and chapters of his political career during and prior to the Weimar period are sometimes mentioned in the literature, too. Only specialists would know that he was also a very prolific writer, indeed an intellectual of some standing and some influence.2
Almost throughout his life, beginning in early adulthood, Walther Rathenau was in the habit of cultivating an ever-growing circle of friends and correspondents. Since the late 1890s, he moved in the intellectual circles of Berlin, part of the illustrious urban elite of the Prussian capital, including the rich, the powerful, and the bright, the upper crust of a prosperous metropolis. In the elegant salons of Grunewald, at the western outskirts of town, he met, among industrialists, financiers, and highly placed government officials, some of Berlin's most successful authors and artists, and occasionally a sampling of the outstanding academic men in town. This, moreover, was never a provincial milieu. It was open to the right kind of visitors from elsewhere