In Europe

been killed in 1931 by the New York cab which only nicked him? Or if Corporal Hitler had been asphyxiated during that last mustard-gas attack in late summer 1918, instead of merely blinded? Or if the attack on Rathenau had only …
    But Rathenau was killed, and Churchill was not.
    Rathenau's assassination was probably the most important political killing of the twentieth century. He was every bit as exceptional a character as Churchill or Charles de Gaulle, every bit as brilliant and charismatic. Hepossessed the vision of Jean Monnet, the clarity of Alfred Einstein. ‘You sensed,’ Haffner wrote, ‘that if he had not been a minister of foreign affairs in the year 1922, he could just as easily have been a German philosopher from 1800, an international financier from 1850, a great rabbi or a hermit.’ Like Hitler, he possessed the magic power needed to move masses; the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets after his assassination bore witness to that. His power, though, was a positive one, a power that could have made the twentieth century turn out quite differently for Germany and for Europe.
    For years, Rathenau had stood at the helm of the Allgemeine ElektrizitätsGesellschaft (AEG), a huge German concern his father had helped to found. He was one of the few people to recognise the imminent approach of the First World War, and did everything in his power to turn the tide. That was why he also supported the British arms-control proposal of 1912, a proposal that was immediately scuppered by the kaiser. Rathenau realised that a country's influence was based not only on military force, but every bit as much on economic power and moral authority. In late 1913 he launched a plan to arrive at an economic merger with the countries of Central and Western Europe:
Mitteleuropa
, an early forerunner of the European Union. During the First World War he was responsible for raw materials distribution, afterwards he was an extremely successful minister of reconstruction. But the most important thing was his vision, his style, his way of thinking.
    Joseph Roth, too, visited Rathenau's house to pay his respects. ‘Throughout the house and throughout this man's entire being, a conciliatory spirit reigned,’ he wrote. Downstairs was the ‘desk of the public official’, upstairs ‘the quiet writing table of the private man and writer,’ but all of it was surrounded by books: Kant, Goethe, Plutarch, the Bible in all forms and translations. There was ‘almost no name from the history of philosophy, the great, endless history of the mind, that was not represented here. And everything he read and wrote breathed that same conciliatory urge … ‘I come past the place where he was murdered. It is not true that every murder is a single murder. This murder here was a thousandfold, incapable of being forgotten, incapable of being avenged.’
    The monument on Königsallee was built a quarter of a century later. The street is narrow, the old trees have been cut down, most of themansions have been replaced by modern villas, only the bend in the road is still recognisable. A few hundred metres before this bend is where Rathenau's house must have stood. The cars race by, the birds sing songs of spring. This is how oblivion works.

    I, Bertolt Brecht, hail from black forests old.
    My mother bore me through the streets of town
    As I lay hidden in her womb. And the chill of forests cold
    Shall gnaw within me, till death does cut me down.
    In the asphalt city I have my home.
    Berlin grew cynical. In the 1920s a separate Berlin began to arise, consisting of artists and the new moneyed classes, with parties that bore no resemblance to the rough-and-tumble soirées of the Mackie Messers and Polly Peachums from right after the war. Now they were snobbish gatherings, ruled by the motto ‘Love is the foolish overestimation of the minimal difference between one sexual object and the other.’ After the revolution and death, the Berliners were, in their own way, reinventing sex.
    Stefan Zweig, an Austrian, was flabbergasted to see how the Berliners ‘practised perversion with all the systematic thoroughness in them,’ and with all the pathetic eroticism that went along with that. ‘Painted boys with artificial bosoms paraded up and down Kurfürstendamm, and not just the professionals: every high-school boy wanted to earn a little pocket money … Young girls liked to brag about being perverse: at any school in Berlin, to think