‘Palace’ Of Jewish-German Right Wing Antisemite Remade As Art Installation For 100th Anniversary of His Murder

(Algemeiner) Whoever organized this exhibit did not do their homework on Walther Rathenau, who — by today’s Jewish standards — would have to be considered an “antisemite” and a “self-hating Jew,” and had he not been assassinated by members of the Freicorps, he would not be now seen as either a Jewish martyr or eternal victim of antisemitism.

And there can be no doubt that if the elitist Walther Rathenau were to this so-called “art” installation at his former home, he would be appalled — and know that his cause was lost and that the Ashkenazis won the war and their spirit now dominates Germany.

From the Algemeiner:

The country home of Germany’s first and only Jewish foreign minister is being reinvented into an art installation to mark 100 years since his assassination by far-right extremists in Berlin.

Oxford University’s Jewish Country Houses Project and UrKultur, an international arts consultancy firm, have commissioned a new artwork in the house, known as Schloss Freienwalde, by British-German painter Sophie von Hellermann. The estate was owned by Walther Rathenau, a former foreign minister of the Weimar Republic…

…Rathenau published a number of writings on the nation state, economy, war and revolution, including “Of Things to Come” in 1917. On June 24, 1922, only three months after becoming foreign minister, he was assassinated in Berlin on his way to work by far-right extremists, becoming “a martyred icon of German democracy,” urKultur explained. His assassins later committed suicide but the man who helped them escape the scene of the killing, Ernst Techow, was tried in court and convicted.

Rathenau acquired and restored Schloss Freienwalde, a former Prussian royal palace outside of Berlin, in 1909. It is now a museum dedicated to his life. On Friday, the 100th year anniversary of Rathenau’s murder, the German Embassy in Canada paid tribute to his memory, writing in a Twitter post, “It’s 100 years later but the dangers of right-wing extremism and terror are still vital in Germany and the world. With various projects … we continue our work against right-wing extremism, fascism, racism and antisemitism.”

The organizers of this exhibit did not read Kerry Bolton’s 2013 article, “German Nationalist Jews In The Weimar And Early Third Reich Eras,” because if they had, they would have been appalled by Rathenau’s right-wing extremism, anti-Ashkenazi hate, and his scathing critiques of his fellow Jews.

We would encourage you to read Bolton’s essay in its entirety, but specifically off Rathenau, he writes,

…The prominent Jewish businessman and foreign minister (1922) Walther Rathenau urged German Jews to become German and “not to follow the flag of their philo-Semitic protectors any longer.” There should be “the conscious self-education and adaptation of the Jews to the expectations of the gentiles.”

He further repudiated “mimicry” and sought rather “the shedding of tribal attitudes which, whether they be good or bad in themselves, are known to be odious to our countrymen, and the replacement of these attributes by more appropriate ones.” The result should not be “Germans by imitation” but “Jews of German character and education.” Furthermore, he advocated a willed change in the Jewish physiognomy and way of bearing, to physically renew the Jews over the course of several generations, away from the “unathletic build, narrow shoulders, clumsy feet, and sloppy roundish shape.” In character the German Jews, noted Rathenau, rarely steered a middle course between “wheedling subservience and vile arrogance.”

Rathenau was also hostile to the influx of Jews from the East [Ashkenzai] after World War I, a hostility that was widespread among the old established German Jewish population, and forcefully expressed by the German-nationalist Jews. To them the Eastern Jews were the living stereotypes of anti-Semitic propaganda. Unlike the German Jews they maintained their separatism, spoke Yiddish, the older Jews dressing in their conspicuous garb, while the younger ones were susceptible to Zionism and revolutionary movements. Their tendency to congregate in urban areas gave the impression of more numbers than there were, living a ghetto existence of their own making. These were the Ostjuden; beggars and peddlers. A Jewish exhibition on the Ostjuden states of the German-Jewish attitude that “most regarded the Ostjuden as a hindrance to German-Jewish integration, and many aid organizations therefore encouraged their settlement abroad…. Whether contemptuous or compassionate, responses to the plight of East European Jewry demonstrate the extent to which German Jews had eroded Jewish national moorings.”

From conservative opinion, Oswald Spengler regarded Rathenau with esteem, a regard that Rathenau returned.[7] Rathenau’s assassination by members of the Rightist paramilitary Freikorps in 1922 represents perhaps the first shot in the tragedy of German Jews who regarded themselves above all as Germans during the Weimar and Third Reich eras. Jews being widely associated with Communism and the new Soviet Union, it was assumed that Rathenau’s signing of the Treaty of Rapallo with the Soviet Union was a conspiracy between Jewish capitalists (represented by Rathenau) and Jewish Bolsheviks. Rather, this was a measure of realpolitik that was designed to make gains for Germany in bypassing the Versailles diktat, and was a formative move in what became a pro-Soviet orientation among much of the German Nationalist Right, especially with the rise of Stalin, a course that Spengler had himself suggested the possibility of: an Eastern orientation for Germany.[8] As for the Treaty of Rapallo, Trotsky was so aggravated by what he saw as concessions to Germany that he resigned as commissar for foreign affairs, rather than continue with negotiations with “German imperialists.”

The Jews of anti-Semitic stereotype were conspicuous. They were guilty of playing into the hands of uncompromising anti-Semites, which also suited the agenda of the then-insignificant Zionist movement in Germany. Indeed, from the birth of the Zionist movement, there has always been a symbiosis between anti-Semitism and Zionism to the point where Zionist agencies have provided the mainstay for neo-Nazi groups.[9] As will be seen here, briefly, the same symbiosis existed between the National Socialist party and the Zionists in Germany while both repudiated the German nationalists of Jewish descent. Until then, Zionism had received such opposition from Jews in Germany that Herzl’s original plans to hold the First Zionist Congress in Munich had to be changed to Basel.[10]

Please read Bolton’s original essay for his bibliographical sources and complete citations. We also recommend reading Rathenau’s 1897 short essay, “Hear, Oh, Israel!” — a plea to his fellow Jews to follow the edict, “When in Rome, do as the Romans” when it came to living peacefully with in their host German nation.