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:

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.”