New Biography of Walter Rathenau Shows Rise in Position of German Jews

A fine word picture of that great German patriot, Walter Rathenau, is presented in a new biography of the victim of Nationalistic oppression. The biography by Count Harry Kressler is no more brilliant than the review by James W. Gerard, former ambassador to Germany, writing about Rathenau in “The Sun.”

Nothing more clearly marks the change from the Kaiser’s Germany to the German of after-the-war than the elevation of Walter Rathenau, Jew, industrial organizer, dreamer and writer, to the high post of Secretary for Foreign Affairs of the German Commonwealth, says Mr. Gerard.

Continuing, he says, “In the Germany that I knew before the war no Jew could hold any title, no Jew could be an officer of the army. If a Jew wished to win the envied particle ‘von’ before his surname he had first to undergo Christian baptism. It was only a few years to the time when the product of the Royal Berlin Porcelain factory was called ‘Jews’ porcelain’ because each Jew in Prussia was compelled to sell each year a certain quota of porcelain abroad. Only a few years to the time when Jews were allowed to meet for worship in Berlin, provieded they met in a back room and made no noise. Not many years to the time when the union of Jew and Christian was punished as a crime. And so this most interesting and detailed life of ‘Walther Rathenau’ by Count Harry Kessler, well translated by W. D. Robson Scott and Lawrence Hyde (Harcourt, Brace & Co), is not only the absorbing biography of an extraordinary man, but is a picture of the march of the German nation toward a position more liberal, more in accord with the civilizations of France, England and America.”