Walter Rathenau evocatively summoned images of catastrophes in an open letter to Colonel Edward House in December 1918 when it became clear that Germany would have to reckon with a hard peace. Never in the history of the world, he wrote, had three countries and three men - Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, and David Lloyd George - wielded such power to decide the fate of a talented, healthy, and industrious people:
If in future decades and centuries the thriving German cities become desolate and fall apart, commerce is destroyed, the German spirit in science and art dries up, and millions of German people are torn from their native land and driven out; will history and God judge that this people has been dealt with justly and that these three men have carved out that justice? What we are threatened with, what hatred proposes to do to us, is destruction, the destruction of German life, now and for all times.
Similarly, the appeal to “all nations” was wildly exaggerated. “We will be destroyed,” Rathenau lamented, and painted a bleak picture of German misery twenty years after the peace accord. “The cities . . . half dead blocks of stone, still partly inhabited by wretched people, the roads are run down, the forests cut down, a miserable harvest growing in the fields. Harbors, railways, canals in ruins, and everywhere the sad reminders standing, the high, weather-worn buildings from the time of greatness. . . . A folk lives and is dead. . . . The border to Asia now lies at the Rhine, the Balkans now extend to the North Sea.”