Ludwig Alfred Raschdau (September 29, 1849 in Radoschau; August 19, 1943 in Berlin) was a German diplomat, lawyer, Prussian ambassador and president of the German-Asiatic Society.
Raschdau studied law and oriental languages in Breslau, Heidelberg and Paris and, in order to earn money, went into the interpreting service of the diplomatic service in Prussia without taking any exams. He began in Constantinople in 1870, but then continued his studies in Strasbourg until he passed the state law exam, completed his legal traineeship in Alsace and returned to Constantinople in 1876 as a diplomat in the foreign service. There he reported on the Balkan refugees who had been driven out of their homeland and who had come to the city in large numbers. From 1879 he was briefly consul in Smyrna, and until 1882 vice-consul for Egypt in Alexandria. His path led him on to New York City and in 1884 to Havana. In America he gained insight into the economic structures of the continent. From 1886 he worked for Bismarck in Berlin, first as a senior adviser in the trade policy department and then in the political department. In the early 1890s he was one of the Foreign Office's closest foreign policy advisors. In 1894 he was sent away as envoy to the Weimar court and the other Thuringian courts because he had fallen out with the "grey eminence" in the ministry of Friedrich von Holstein. He had a lot to do with Duke George II (Saxony-Meiningen). He was then appointed envoy to Portugal in 1897, which would have put him under Holstein's command. He then resigned as envoy zD and was finally retired in 1915.
From 1908 to 1923, Raschdau was a political employee of the Norddeutsche and Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. In 1916, he took over the chairmanship of the exclusive German-Asiatic Society from the late General Colmar von der Goltz. In 1923, the Central Office for Research into the Causes of War founded a support association to maintain international contacts, of which Raschdau was president until 1929.
