<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Windows-1252">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<br>
"Rathenau --- according to the histories - was prophet and architect of the cartelized state. From what began as a tiny bureau at the War Office in Berlin, he had coordinated Germany's economy during the World War, controlling supplies, quotas and prices, cutting
across and demolishing the barriers of secrecy and property that separated firm from firm--- a corporate Bismarck, before whose power no account book was too privileged, no agreement too clandestine. His father Emil Rathenau had founded AEG, the German General
Electric Company, but young Walter [sic!] was more than just another industrial heir --- he was a philosopher with a vision of the postwar State. He saw the war in progress as a world revolution, out of which would rise neither Red communism nor an unhindered
Right, but a rational structure in which business would be the true, the rightful authority --- a structure based, not surprisingly, on the one he'd engineered in Germany for fighting the World War."
<br>
<br>
(pp. 164-165; Pynchon, alas, misspells Rathenau's first name Walther continually. And of course Pyndustry, a bunch of fanboys, is largely following him ...)
<br>
<br>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br>
<h1 class="item-title"><font size="-1">»Ich hoffe, die Literaturgeschichte wird mir zehn Zeilen widmen«</font></h1>
<font size="-1"></font>
<h3 class="item-subtitle"><font size="-1">Die Fiktionalisierungen Walther Rathenaus
<br>
</font></h3>
<h3 class="item-subtitle"><font size="-1">Laura Said</font><br>
</h3>
<font size="-1">Die Studie bietet einen Überblick über Texte, die den ‚Epochenmann‘ Walther Rathenau fiktionalisieren. Untersucht werden gut fünfzig epische und dramatische Werke, die zwischen 1910 und 2012 im deutschsprachigen Raum wie im Ausland erschienen.
Sie bezeugen das anhaltende Interesse an diesem Politiker, dessen vielfältige Positionierungen als Wirtschaftsmagnat, als Politiker, als Jude, als Mäzen und Schriftsteller aufgegriffen werden. Immer zeigt sich der 24. Juni 1922 als die maßgebliche Zäsur in
der Bewertung seines Schaffens. Kein anderer deutscher Politiker des 20. Jahrhunderts wurde so oft Gegenstand literarischer Darstellungen und spiegelt dabei auch die Politik der jeweiligen Regime wider, zu deren Zeit die Texte entstanden.<br>
<br>
Keywords: (...) Pynchon, Thomas <br>
</font><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.winter-verlag.de/en/detail/978-3-8253-6586-8/Said_Ich_hoffe_die_Literaturgeschichte/">https://www.winter-verlag.de/en/detail/978-3-8253-6586-8/Said_Ich_hoffe_die_Literaturgeschichte/</a><br>
<br>
Has anybody already checked this out?<br>
<br>
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br>
<br>
Also interesting in this context:<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_of_300">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_of_300</a><br>
<br>
<font size="-1">> ... The theory dates to a statement made by Walther Rathenau in a 1909 article "Geschäftlicher Nachwuchs" in Neue Freie Presse:
</font>
<blockquote>
<p><font size="-1">Dreihundert Männer, von denen jeder jeden kennt, leiten die wirtschaftliche Geschicke des Kontinents und suchen sich Nachfolger aus ihrer Umgebung.</font></p>
</blockquote>
<font size="-1"></font>
<p><font size="-1">This could be translated as: "Three hundred men, all of whom know one another, direct the economic destiny of the continent and choose their successors from their area."</font></p>
<font size="-1"></font>
<p><font size="-1">In context, Rathenau was actually deploring the oligarchic implications of this statement, and did not suggest that the "Three hundred" were Jewish. However, by 1912 Theodor Fritsch had seized upon the sentence as an "open confession of indubitable
Jewish hegemony" and as proof that Rathenau was the "secret Kaiser of Germany." The idea became more popular after the World War I, and the spread of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Rathenau addressed the issue in a 1921 letter, stating that the
three hundred referred to were leaders in the business world, rather than Jews.</font></p>
<font size="-1"></font>
<p><font size="-1">After Rathenau's assassination in June 1922, one of his assassins explicitly cited Rathenau's membership in the "Three hundred Elders of Zion" as justification for the killing. This prompted the Reichstag to pass a Law for the Protection
of the Republic making propagation of the myth a prosecutable offense. Nevertheless, it was still used by the Nazis before and after they took power ... <</font></p>
Note that Wikipedia does not offer a German version of the article. <br>
<br>
</body>
</html>