Description: A figure of great intellectual power who ran the German state, however briefly, during one of its most tumultuous periods, and whose life was "the essence of German Jewish history."
Review Quotes:
"In this remarkable biography, Shulamit Volkov offers a subtle analysis of Walther Rathenau's complex and often ambiguous personality. She describes admirably how Rathenau's always-reaffirmed Jewishness increasingly became a target for the antisemitic elites of Imperial Germany and, notwithstanding his outstanding services to Germany, an object of fanatical hatred for the extreme Right under Weimar, which led to his assassination. Shulamit Volkov's book is history at its best."--Saul Friedlander, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Nazi Germany and the Jews--Saul Friedlander