Professor Shulamit Volkov
Walther Rathenau is best known for being Germany's foreign minister and for having been murdered by enemies of the Weimar Republic as its symbol and representative in the summer of 1922. This, however, was only the peak of a long route, along which he was trying to enter politics and influence Germany's fate both 'from within' in one or another official post and 'from without' as member of the upper crust of Berlin's social elite, at least since 1907/8 and then most particularly during the First World War. As a powerful indsutrialist and banker he had many opportunities to exrecise his influence, but being an individualist, not belonging to any party and, perhaps even more significantly a Jew, there were also many difficulties along his route. In this lecture I'll analyze Rathenau's career and evaluate his success as well as his failures, throwing some new light on the history of Germany and on that of its Jews during these years.
Shulamit Volkov, Professor of Modern History and incumbent of the Konrad Adenauer Chair for Comparative European History at Tel Aviv University, Israel. Member of the Israel Academy of Science and the Humanities. Served as Head of the Institute for German History and the Graduate School of History at TAU. She was Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Historisches Kolleg in Munich, as well as a visiting scholar at St. Antony's College, Oxford, L'École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and Columbia University, New York. Published books and essays on German social history, German Jewish history and the history of Antisemitism; on issues in the history of the Enlightenment, and on the historiography of National-Socialism. Her last book, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites. Trials in Emancipation, appeared at the Cambridge University Press in 2006.
