A Return to Origins

...In pursuit of answers, Blumenthal begins his tale in the 17th century with an interesting account of one of his ancestors, Jost Liebmann, a court jeweler to the Brandenburg nobility...

...The unrequited love affair of Germany's Jews with their native country ended in disaster...

...It hardly mattered that they felt profoundly German and contributed enormously to their country's welfare, for among the majority of Germans "dislike of Jews was never far below the surface...

...What, in short, accounts for the collapse of "the German-Jewish symbiosis...

...A blond-haired, blue-eyed boy who could easily pass for a "true" German, the young Blumenthal defied his parents' wishes and ventured out to see for himself what was happening on the streets of Germany's capital...

...and Arthur Eloesser, a well-known early 20th-century literary scholar and critic...

...He brings it up to today with thoughtful reflections on his own family life in Oranienburg, Berlin, Shanghai, and America...

...Reviewed by Alvin H. Rosenfeld Professor of English and director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program...

...His book, however, is nothing if not an emphatic reversal and refutation of his very resolve to escape from history...

...Foremost among these are questions that probe the nature of the German-Jewish relationship: "What had gone on between German Christians and Jews, and why...

...For 3 00 years, the invisible wall had never been breached...

...Along the way, in prose that is a pleasure to read, the author traverses a broad ground and offers colorfully drawn portraits...

...One puts down this book with the recognition that, while there are no adequate compensations for what the Jews of Germany lost, there is some consolation in what history and memory are still able to retrieve...

...it had all been for nothing...

...But his home was no longer a haven, for the very next day Gestapo agents came to the Blumenthal residence on the Kurfürstendamm, seized his father, and sent him to Buchenwald with thousands of others...

...In fact, as a family history intended to serve the larger purposes of social history, the book is admirable and stands as a sober-eyed yet inspired act of filial tribute...

...Law and culture were basic and would guarantee his place in German society...

...Blumenthal is not always accurate either in his presentation of historical detail...

...It is also more than a little intriguing as a personal testament, because if ever a nonprofessional historian has been summoned by history, Blumenthal is that man...

...When the marriage failed, it did so disastrously and, more than half a century after the greatest disaster of all, we have yet to comprehend the full extent of its causes and consequences...

...When he returned from the Buchenwald concentration camp six weeks later the senior Blumenthal, 60 pounds lighter and barely able to talk, was a "shriveled, broken, hardly recognizable man...

...they never garnered true public support...

...The savagery of those roundups marked a decisive turning point for Germany's Jews...

...In the face of W. Michael Blumenthal's earlier belief that "the past was history— tragic, incomprehensible and eminently forgettable," The Invisible Wall enacts a stunning return to history, origins, family, and people...

...Indeed, it represents an immense effort on the author's part to look back and reclaim a meaningful connection to the past...

...But their integration was a reality imposed from above...

...During World War I, they demonstrated their patriotism for all to see by fighting bravely for the German cause, and they died in large numbers...

...In this respect, his book may be symptomatic of some larger currents stirring within American culture, and specifically within the spiritual and intellectual life of American Jews...

...There was a marriage here, of sorts, but as Blumenthal says, it "was a marriage of convenience...

...His Germany, it should be pointed out, is exclusively Prussia, a highly stratified society characterized in no small part by markedly conservative, nationalistic, militaristic, authoritarian, and Judeophobic tendencies...

...Similarly, the unnamed "Swiss Nazi leader assassinated by a Jew," Wilhelm Gustloff, was not a Swiss Nazi but Hitler's personal representative in Switzerland...

...Blumenthal documents a pattern of Jewish determination to gain acceptance and the equally determined German assertions of resentment, rejection and hostility...

...He concludes: "They had desperately wanted to be Germans, but it hadn't worked...

...The result is a book of ambitious historical scope by a man who has devoted most of his professional life to business and government (among other things, he was Secretary of the Treasury under President Carter and CEO of the Bendix Corporation...

...Prior to the outbreak of the November pogrom commonly known as Kristallnacht, Ewald Blumenthal had been a committed assimilationist who took for granted that "his equality as a citizen was anchored in the law and that German Christians and Jews had a shared love for culture and learning...

...Once the good times gave way to economic trouble and political turmoil, the Jews again faced discrimination and persecution...

...They helped to develop key sectors of Germany's economy and added an unmatched eminence to its intellectual and cultural life...

...These and other occasional inaccuracies render The Invisible Wall less than fully reliable and reveal the shortcomings of Blumenthal not being a historian...

...Illuminating in themselves, these biographical sketches are usefully placed within the social, political and cultural history of their day to illustrate the ambivalent course of Jewish-Christian interactions...

...Indiana University W. Michael Blumenthal was not yet 13 years old when, on the night of November 9,1938, Berlin's large synagogue on Fasanenstrasse went up in flames...

...the more they would be resisted and resented...

...What he witnessed quickly sent him running home in fright...

...He is less consistently successful at historical explanation, and some of his conclusions are too generalized to stand up to scrutiny...

...Nevertheless, even within that society there were periods of liberalization and reform, and as the Jews came to enjoy the privileges of legal enfranchisement, there were interludes of seeming accommodation...

...For, among other things, The Invisible Wall can accurately be read as a belated return to origins, the intellectual equivalent of the spiritual act that religious Jews call t'shuva...

...In his early pages, for instance, the author remarks that after arriving in America at the age of 21, he never looked back...

...Thus, his claim that "there is no evidence to support the argument that most Germans knew of the killing" is seriously challenged by the findings of Israeli historian David Bankier, whose important work on German public opinion under Nazism is conspicuously missing from The Invisible Wall's bibliography, as are numerous other scholarly works that should inform a study of this kind...

...Giacomo Meyerbeer, the celebrated composer of popular operas...

...Blumenthal, who confesses he is "not a historian," is at his best in his lucid and evocative exposition of this story...

...Germany needed its Jews for economic reasons, and the Jews needed Germany as a safe haven with scope for their unique talents...

...As for Ewald's integrationist aspirations, which he shared with so many others of his generation, "The dream was over, and the history of German Jewry was finished for good...

...Blumenthal is hardly the first to tell this story, but he presents it in a new and engaging manner...

...Time and again Blumenthal raises questions of major historical importance...

...Running like a refrain through this book of "triumphs and troubles" is the realization that, however ardent their loyalty to their country and however noteworthy their accomplishments in business, the professions and the arts, the Jews were ultimately mistaken in their belief that they would be accepted on the same footing as their German Christian neighbors...

...As Blumenthal observes, though, "the greater their success and the harder they tried to impress...

...He forgot about Germany and the catastrophe that it visited upon the Jews, Americanized rapidly, worked hard, and focused his energies solely on the future...

...It was Hans Globke and not Joseph Goebbels, for instance, who drafted the decree that "every male Jew add 'Israel' and every female 'Sara' to their name," and it was Interior Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart and Justice Minister Franz Guertner who signed it...

...Recognizing that the experience of Germany's Jews can only be understood within the wider context of the country's history, he has taken recourse to his family tree and focused on the stories of six of his ancestors, each of whom exemplifies a revealing chapter of German-Jewish relations in its fullest dimensions...

...In the end, it had become a wall of death...

...Still, if one reads his book as he intended it to be read, as "a personal exploration" of its subject rather than a fully documented scholarly investigation, it is a commendable work...

...In one blow, the anti-Semitism that he thought was a thing of the past had asserted itself ruthlessly and reduced him and all other German Jews to the status of a hunted, beaten, pariah people...

...Why had there been such a promising beginning, so much hope and so much accomplishment—and so terrible an end...

...They include such figures as Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, whose literary salon was at the center of Berlin's cultural life during the late 18th and early 19th century...