In Europe

They saw Versailles as an attempt to undermine the old German values, and anyone wishing to consolidate that peace was a traitor, particularly if he happened to be Jewish and an intellectual.
    ‘Everywhere, hatred was in the air,’ George Grosz wrote, ‘everyone was hated: the Jews, the capitalists, the nobles, the communists, the soldiers,the homeowners, the workers, the unemployed, the
Reichswehr
… the control boards, the politicians, the department stores and the Jews again … It was as though Germany had been split in two, and both halves hated each other like in the
Nibelungensage
. And we knew it, or at least we began to realise it.’
    The climate was described perfectly by Joseph Roth in his novel
The Spider's Web
, a story of intrigue. The narrative thread followed two protagonists: Theodor Lohse, a frustrated young middle-class man who gradually becomes a political criminal, and Benjamin Lenz, who ‘plays the pipes of the carousel’ undisturbed, forges reports for foreign missions, steals documents and stamps from government offices and has himself locked up with people in custody, pumps them for information, and waits for ‘his’ day to arrive. At the centre of the web is Munich. Important secondary characters are Ludendorff and Adolf Hitler.
    Roth spun his spider's web with such great care that something miraculous happened: his fantasy was outstripped by historical reality. Starting on 7 October, 1923, his book was published in serial form in Vienna's
Arbeiterzeitung
. The last instalment appeared on 6 November, 1923, and it was on 8–9 November that Ludendorff and Hitler attempted – unsuccessfully – to seize power. In Munich, of all places. But by then the most important switch had already been thrown.
    In October 1914 Walther Rathenau wrote to his Dutch friend Frederik van Eeden: ‘Who among us knows whether he will live to see peace? We will experience more difficult things than those we have seen as yet. A hard generation will arise, and may even crush our hearts underfoot.’ Today a little monument stands at a bend in the shady Königsallee where Rathenau was shot and killed by members of that ‘hard generation’ on 24 June, 1922. By then he was Germany's minister of foreign affairs and had succeeded in reducing by almost half the reparation payments to be made under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and he was doing his best to restore faith in Germany. His greatest mistake was his apparent success at doing just that.
    People like Rathenau were in constant danger. According to the propaganda of the extreme right, they were responsible for every disaster that had overtaken Germany since summer 1918: the stab in the back to avictorious army, the humiliation of Versailles, and after that the collapse of the economy in the stranglehold of the reparation payments. ‘
Knallt ab den Walter Rathenau / Die gottverfluchte Judensau
’ was a text sung openly by members of the
Freikorps
. Rathenau himself was particularly worried by the way hatred was becoming a commonplace social phenomenon.‘When the war was over these people were unable to find their way back to normal life,’ he told the society journalist Bella Fromm. ‘Now they don't even want to go back to normal life. The desire to kill and loot has taken possession of them.’ Two days later he was dead.
    The murder was carried out by three young students, led by a young ex-lieutenant. This officer was also part of a spider's web, the Organisation Consul, led by the same Captain Ehrhardt who had organised the Kapp Putsch. The schoolboys had convinced each other that Rathenau was one of the Elders of Zion. They shot him from a moving car while he was on his way to work.
    Rathenau's corpse was at his home for viewing. Count Kessler went there: ‘He lies in an open coffin in his study, where I have spent so much time with him, his head turned slightly to the right, a very peaceful expression on his deeply lined face, a handkerchief of fine material draped over the lowest, shattered part of it.’
    The killers made a run for it right away: one of them was arrested quite quickly, the other two cycled through a great part of Germany, hid in an abandoned castle, were discovered there and killed in the gunfight that followed. A few years later the Nazis elevated them to the status of martyrs.
    Historians are always faced with questions that cannot be asked. What would have happened to Europe, for example, if Winston Churchill had