Fatal Attraction

Michael Blumenthal’s appointment last year as director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin was a surprise. None of his many past careers--chief negotiator of the GATT Treaty in Geneva under the Kennedy-Johnson administrations, chairman and CEO of the Bendix and Burroughs corporations, university professor and secretary of the Treasury in the Carter administration--would appear to have prepared him for this post. His new book, however, makes plain his long-standing and deeply personal interest in the entangled relationship of Germans and Jews.

In “The Invisible Wall,” Blumenthal chronicles the history of German Jews by using his family’s experiences and the lives of six ancestors--Jost Liebmann, Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Louis Blumenthal, Arthur Eloesser and Ewald Blumenthal--to paint a panorama of the times and of the political and social conditions affecting the Jewish minority over the entire span of German history. A pattern of discrimination, hope and disillusionment materializes from these accounts, which ultimately lead us to the inconceivable: the Holocaust. Blumenthal attempts to describe what happened, and he does it without accusation. His book examines the hopes and limits of assimilation.

Jews in Germany had always been subjected to terrible discrimination. They lived in ghettos, the so-called Jewish Quarters. After the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century, German principalities began the practice of keeping “court Jews,” who were given special protection and sheltered by the royal family. Jost Liebmann was a court Jew. He rose from being a traveling merchant to becoming a court jeweler and finally the most prosperous and influential Jew of his time. In 1671, Frederik Wilhelm allowed 50 Jewish families to settle in Brandenburg. As long as they did not disturb the Christian majority, they were allowed to travel, own homes and pursue a trade. Still, they were not permitted to build a synagogue.

By the end of the 17th century, nearly 600 Jews lived in Brandenburg. They lived in isolation, were disliked and were always at the mercy of the capricious ruler’s charity, often leaving them defenseless against attacks. Jews called life under Frederik Wilhelm’s reign “Iron Times.” They were forced to secure their existence by paying exorbitant taxes. Separate gallows, one for Christians and one for Jews, were often in use. Jews spoke Yiddish and had no access to a general education; it was only in 1743 that the first Jew was allowed to study medicine.

In Berlin, Varnhagen, who lived from 1771 to 1833, was denied a formal education because she was a woman. The upper-middle-class daughter of a prosperous merchant, she was an autodidact who considered her Jewish heritage a damnation yet who nonetheless lived during a period when prominent Jews in Berlin created their own Jewish aristocracy and were able to amass astounding fortunes. The wealthy Jews of Berlin such as the Itzigs and Ephraims associated with aristocrats. In the second half of the 18th century, philosophers, writers, artists, aristocrats and Jews mingled in Varnhagen’s famous salon. The clever and educated Rahel was interested in literature and theater and was at the center of a seemingly enlightened world. Appearances, however, were deceiving. Jews were still highly taxed. Even a great Prussian reformer like Baron von und zum Stein was a staunch anti-Semite, though Jews profited from his reforms. They were allowed to vote in municipal elections and were even voted into the local government. Blumenthal describes the Emancipation Edict of 1812 as a sort of Magna Carta for Prussian Jews. In the Napoleonic wars, they proved themselves grateful citizens. More than a thousand Jews fought for the first time in the Prussian army, 72 of whom were awarded Iron Crosses for valor.

The famous composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, born in 1791, was acclaimed and celebrated throughout Europe yet criticized in his own country for being too “cosmopolitan.” He achieved his first success in Italy and moved to Paris in 1837. Meyerbeer, a Jew from Berlin, was acclaimed in France as having created the consummate French opera. Though he was awarded the post of Berlin’s musical director, the sensitive composer considered himself subject to unjust discrimination. Yet he was so proud of his Prussian heritage that he rejected France’s offer to bury him in the Pantheon. Meyerbeer’s grave can be found in a Berlin cemetery.

The optimism of the post-Edict years was soon replaced by a flaring of anti-Semitism. Varnhagen, who had converted to Christianity, realized in her later years that “Judaism was the true essence of her being.” Blumenthal describes in this account and in following chapters the difficulties encountered by religious converts. Jews who became Christians were regarded with suspicion by Christians and Jews alike. Many Jews converted to Christianity in the second half of the 19th century, but this did not protect most of them from being persecuted under the Nazi regime.

The great social and economic rise of German Jews in the later half of the 19th century came during the Second German Reich. Many Jews flourished in professions that the Christians had assigned or left to them, such as banking and trade. By 1860, there were twice as many Jews as non-Jews among Prussian bankers. Gerson Bleichroder, a Jew, was Bismarck’s banker and financed his Wars of Unification. The Jewish banking families--Warburg, Arnhold and Oppenheim--were considered generous patrons who “founded the big banks, financed the railroads, underwrote the new industrial enterprises, and had their fingers in every deal.” Before 1933, every second lawyer in Berlin was of Jewish descent. Entire spheres of business, such as the textile industry in Berlin, were run by Jews.

From the start of the Industrial era, Jewish merchants and entrepreneurs rode the peak of the economic boom, and they became symbols for both the industrial revolution and the grave social changes that the masses were forced to endure. Jews barely resisted the growing wave of anti-Semitism; even in the 1930s they could barely defend themselves against discrimination because, according to Blumenthal, “the invisible wall” was just too powerful.

Blumenthal’s grandfather Louis, a successful banker in Oranienburg, was a respected citizen in his community, an exponent of upper-middle-class values and a city councilman. His son Ewald, the author’s father, lost the bank in the global economic crisis and left for Berlin to become a merchant. Before that, he served in World War I, as did nearly 100,000 other German Jews. At the beginning of this century, Ewald bore witness to a Jewish registration designed to ferret out alleged draft dodgers. After the war, Jews were held responsible for the Versailles Treaty and for the punitive conditions it imposed on Germany.

For years Jews could not and did not wish to know the extent of the hatred directed toward them. Ewald Blumenthal wouldn’t consider leaving Germany even after the Nazi rise to power in 1933 that made daily life for Jews increasingly unbearable. It was only after he spent six weeks in the concentration camp at Buchenwald in 1939 that the Blumenthal family decided to immigrate to Shanghai, a last refuge for German Jews without visas.

As a child, Michael Blumenthal came to Berlin with his parents but left six months before the war broke out. He witnessed events such as the boycotting of Jewish businesses (including his parents’), the burning of synagogues and the impact of many discriminatory measures designed by the Nazis to reduce Jews to “subhumans.” Blumenthal describes these events dispassionately without exposing his own feelings, sounding less like a witness of the times than like a professor soberly probing his subject.

His uncle Arthur Eloesser studied literature and history and would have become a professor but was denied a university career. Instead, he became a theater critic for the Vossische Zeitung. He too never would have thought of leaving Germany, despite the discrimination. Blumenthal writes that Eloesser thought it to be his greatest fortune to live in Germany as a Jew. In the ‘30s, he traveled to Palestine to visit his son Max, who had emigrated there, yet returned to Germany in spite of the Nazi persecution of Jews. He died there in 1938.

Blumenthal has written well of the tragic fate of Germany’s Jews. It is, between the lines, the story of disappointed love, of betrayal and delusion. The horror of Hitler put an end to German Jewish life. As Blumenthal puts it: “The dream was over.”