The German Genius

meant that almost all of it slipped away. In 1913 he was invited to London for the opening of a new Diesel factory. He took the channel steamer at Antwerp but disappeared during the night; his body was found in the North Sea about ten days later.
    In some areas of the world, Diesel engines now have a more than 50 percent market penetration and are much preferred for such outlets as submarines, mines, and in oil fields.
     
     
    Just as Daimler cars were the fruit of a father-and-son collaboration, so AEG, Germany’s other great engineering company, alongside Siemens, was developed by the father-and-son team of Emil and Walther Rathenau. In fact, Rathenau and Siemens, who at one stage were partners, form brackets to this section, emphasizing how intertwined German science, business, and politics were between the middle of the century and the First World War. 29
    Emil, born in Berlin in 1838, into a wealthy Jewish family, had bought himself a successful machine factory in the north of the city two years before Walther’s birth. Thus he had made one fortune by the time of the Paris Exhibition of 1881 when he saw Edison’s electric lightbulb. He snapped up Edison’s patents and two years later founded the Deutsche Edison-Gesellschaft (German Edison Company, or DEG). This seemed a clever move since he did so in collaboration with his greatest potential customer, Siemens. In fact, in its early years DEG was beset with technical and legal problems (over patents, mainly) and because of this the company was eventually transformed into the Allgemeine Elektrizitätgesellschaft (German General Electric Company, or AEG). The links with Siemens were dissolved and only in 1894 was Emil Rathenau able to begin to turn his firm into the biggest electrotechnical giant in Germany. 30
    The Rathenau family was Jewish only in name. Mathilde Rathenau, the daughter of a Frankfurt banker, took care to give her children (two boys and a girl) a good education in music, painting, poetry, and the classics of literature. For her, business wasn’t everything. 31 Walther never formally accepted Christianity, but he did acknowledge the divinity of Jesus and, in a magistrate’s court in Berlin in 1895, disassociated himself from his former “Mosaic belief.” All his life he was sensitive to the second-class status of Jews in Germany, yet at the same time he advocated assimilation and hoped for equality. Like many other Jews, he regarded himself as a German: everything else was of lesser significance.
    Having a PhD (from Strasbourg), Rathenau kept up with scientific developments—the behavior of metals, electrolysis, hydroelectric power—but he was always more interested in industrial organization, business strategy , and its links to politics, rather than the day-to-day running of companies like AEG. This made him ideal board material, and Rathenau’s real significance is that he formed part of that generation of industrialists—Krupp, Stinnes, and Thyssen were others—who began to rival the army officers, diplomats, and professors at the top of the status ladder, though the rising prestige of the industrialists was opposed by a fierce anticapitalist and anti-industrial feeling in some quarters, who saw industrial power as the main cause of human misery. Although many realized that the Industriestaat was replacing the Agrarstaat , industrialists still found it difficult to progress politically and Rathenau in particular found this frustrating. Yet Germany did change fundamentally from the 1890s onward, when industry replaced agriculture, forestry, and fishing as the mainstay of the country’s GDP and when more workers were employed in industry than in agriculture, and more people lived in cities than in small towns and villages. 32
    Unlike his critics, Rathenau was convinced that industrialization and capitalism were the only secure foundations for a powerful modern state, and he also felt that the German Empire had the long-term edge over Britain, because it also had a strong agricultural sector. 33 He was similarly convinced of Britain’s industrial decline, for which he blamed the trade unions, the poor level of training for engineers, and weak management. He did not believe, however, that the industrial state was an end in itself. “He saw industrial domination as a transitory phase to achieve a greater ‘spiritualised’ period in human history.” 34 He was led in this way to a relatively crude social Darwinism allied with some