In 1925, the German-Jewish industrialist and former Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau emerged from self-imposed seclusion following a failed assassination attempt. Answering the call of the united center-left parties, he defeated Paul von Hindenburg to become president of the struggling Weimar Republic and quickly stabilized the economy with broad economic stimulus. Rathenau’s belief that the Jews should be viewed as another German tribe, just like the Saxons, Bavarians, or Wends, gained gradual acceptance, and the right-wing Völkisch movement withered.

Actually…none of this happened. Rathenau was killed instantly in a 1922 attack, and the Rathenau presidency is the invention of historian Michael Brenner (University of Munich/American University) in a speculative essay in the new volume What Ifs of Jewish History: From Abraham to Zionism (Cambridge, 2016). Brenner and the book’s editor, Gavriel Rosenfeld (Fairfield University), will discuss the role of counterfactual reasoning in historical inquiry. What factors and what actors contributed to the disintegration of a fragile pluralism in the 1920s? What utility do these questions have for the challenges of the 21st century?