Vier Zimmer

1914 · The Revolutionaries · Work 920 of 1,871

A small office on an upper floor of a ministry building in a German city, a sunny day in mid-August, rich warm summer colours, pale cream walls, dark red-brown wooden furniture, a tall casement window open at the far end, a desk piled with letters and lists, at the desk with his back half to the camera a grey-haired man in a dark frock coat, an elderly clerk in black at a standing desk, two more men through an open side door, one in a light summer suit, one in shirtsleeves, and standing at the open window at the far end of the room, the window frame beside his left shoulder, both desks between him and the camera, the man, a living figure in the scene and the only person whose face is sharp, a bald man of forty-six with a moustache and short chin beard in a dark three-piece suit and high white collar, one hand on the window frame, his face turned toward the camera, through the window a large deep green maple shading a red tiled lower roof, below it a bright green sunlit lawn with two old cannons, a small sentry in field grey on a gravel path, and behind the garden trees against a clear blue August sky one tall red brick chimney.

Who
Walther Rathenau (1867–1922) was an industrialist, writer and politician, one of the most unusual figures of imperial Germany and the early Weimar Republic. Born in Berlin on 29 September 1867, he was the son of the Jewish entrepreneur Emil Rathenau, who in 1883 founded the German Edison Company, the forerunner of AEG. He studied physics, chemistry and philosophy, joined the AEG board in 1899 and became chairman of its supervisory board in 1912. In the First World War he headed the War Raw Materials Department, which organised the supply of raw materials for Germany's war economy. He also wrote books on the economy and society, among them "Von kommenden Dingen" (Of Things to Come, 1917). In 1921 he became Minister of Reconstruction, in 1922 Foreign Minister, and on 16 April 1922 he concluded the Treaty of Rapallo with Soviet Russia. Nationalists reviled him as a "politician of fulfilment" of the Versailles terms, antisemites attacked him as a Jew. On 24 June 1922 two young officers of the far-right "Organisation Consul" shot him on his way to the Foreign Office. The Republic honoured him as its martyr until the Nazis suppressed his memory.
The moment
On 8 August 1914, days after the war began, Rathenau asked to be received at the Prussian War Ministry: the country, he warned, was probably supplied with indispensable raw materials for only a limited number of months. War Minister Erich von Falkenhayn then asked him to organise the work himself and allowed him no time to think it over. A decree of 13 August 1914 created the War Raw Materials Department. In mid-August three men sat in four small rooms of the ministry on Leipziger Straße: Rathenau, a retired colonel and a clerk; soon two men from AEG joined them, making five. The first question was for how many months the country was supplied with indispensable materials. Instead of a statistical survey that would have taken six months, a circular went out to the ministry's 900 to 1,000 suppliers. Rathenau described the view from his window himself: a maple spreading over the roof, the ministry garden below with a sentry pacing, two old cannons on the lawn in the sun, and behind it all a tall chimney, to him the sign of German industry. That is where the picture shows him, at the window.
The other side
The machine is missing from the room, and that is the point: this is industry moving into a ministry. A civilian holding a post equivalent to a general's rank declares a nation's economy a matter of war. Four rooms became twenty, then sixty; by 1918 the department had 2,500 staff, had seized metal stocks at some 5,000 firms and set up about 200 war raw materials companies. The core idea came from Wichard von Moellendorff, the drive to carry it through from Rathenau. In the Second World War Albert Speer took inspiration from this organisation. Rathenau himself resigned at the end of March 1915; among the reasons the historian Lothar Gall names envy of the outsider and antisemitic prejudice.

What the sources leave open: The view from the window is known only from Rathenau's own lecture of 20 December 1915, sixteen months later and in his own cause; he gives no exact day. How the rooms were furnished, which floor they were on, what the men wore and what kind of cannons stood in the garden is not recorded. Room, furniture and clothing in the picture are typified.

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