Walther Rathenau in Gravity's Rainbow

Wed Oct 5 04:35:13 CDT 2016

" ... Methoneirine, as the sulfate. Not in Germany, but in the United States. There is a link to the United States. A link to Russia. Why do you think von Maltzan and I saw the Rapallo treaty through? It was necessary to move to the east. Wimpe can tell you. Wimpe, the V-Mann, was always there. Why do you think we wanted Krupp to sell them agricultural machinery so badly? It was also part of the process." (p. 166)

Pynchon pictures Rathenau's commitment to the Rapallo Treaty, that pops up on page 338 again, as if it was simply about extending corporatist structures to the Soviet Union. He does neither emphasize the political meaning - Germany and the Soviet Union coming together to find a way out of their international isolation -, nor does he mention the fact that there was a side-agreement according to which Germany was to deliver industry that would have enabled the Soviet Union to extract oil in Baku without Western help. Correspondingly, Rathenau planed to build up a chain of oil stores and gas stations in Germany that would have sold exclusively Russian products. Germany would have become to a certain degree independent from Western oil. (Interestingly enough, the English Wikipedia article on the Rapallo treaty, unlike its German equivalent, does not mention the oil question at all.) When the Rapallo treaty became known, the Western winners of the war were not happy.

Since the Rathenau assassination contains hardly less obscurities than the one of JFK, some authors - like F. William Engdahl or Paul Schreyer - have conjectured that Big Oil was involved in the killing.

There is no proof for this, though.

Am 04.10.2016 um 13:23 schrieb Kai Frederik Lorentzen:

"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."

(pp. 164-165; Pynchon, alas, misspells Rathenau's first name Walther continually. And of course Pyndustry, a bunch of fanboys, is largely following him ...)

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»Ich hoffe, die Literaturgeschichte wird mir zehn Zeilen widmen«
Die Fiktionalisierungen Walther Rathenaus
Laura Said
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.

Keywords: (...) Pynchon, Thomas

https://www.winter-verlag.de/en/detail/978-3-8253-6586-8/Said_Ich_hoffe_die_Literaturgeschichte/

Has anybody already checked this out?

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Also interesting in this context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_of_300

> ... The theory dates to a statement made by Walther Rathenau in a 1909 article "Geschäftlicher Nachwuchs" in Neue Freie Presse:

Dreihundert Männer, von denen jeder jeden kennt, leiten die wirtschaftliche Geschicke des Kontinents und suchen sich Nachfolger aus ihrer Umgebung.

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."

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.

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 ... <

Note that Wikipedia does not offer a German version of the article.

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