The Invisible Wall: Germans and Jews: A Personal Exploration

by W. Michael Blumenthal

Book Overview

The Invisible Wall is one man's quest to understand the failure of the German-Jewish relationship and to explain the character and attitudes of Germany's assimilated Jews over a three hundred-year period. He found rich and remarkable stories in the lives of six Blumenthal ancestors--all of whom happened to be major figures in German-Jewish history. Jost Liebmann, an itinerant peddler of trinkets and cheap jewels who became court jeweler to the Brandenburg...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1582430128
• ISBN13: 9781582430126
• Release Date: April 1999
• Publisher: Catapult
• Length: 474 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A brilliant history of the Jews in Germany

It's clear from the first page that researching and writing this book was a passion for W. Michael Blumenthal. Blumenthal does a masterful job of creating an objective and insightful narration of the centruries-long and ultimately tragic saga of the Jews in Germany, and an equally remarkable job of interweaving the lives of some of his own ancestors as exemplars of the conditions and opportunities for Jews in Germany through the centuries. The result is an accurate, insightful, and poignant exploration of a terrible, but vitally important part of Western history. It's a book that's worth reading with the same care and attention that the author so clearly put into it. Robert Adler, author of _Medical Firsts: From Hippocrates to the Human Genome; and Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation.

brilliant, insightful well written book

After reading this fascinating account -- I loved the interweaving of biography with general history -- I feel I now understand why the Holocaust happened in Germany. Germany looked like a modern country, but was not really part of Western European culture -- it was dominated by a militarized aristocracy, had never developed true representative democracy, and had achieved a very late unification by rallying its people around racism -- the idealization of the German race, and the denigration of the Jews in their midst. The biography of their monarchs shows a line of really sick, sadistic, militarily obsessed rulers, suitable progenitors for Hitler. A veneer of high culture and a strong econmy made them look like a modern country, but underneath was a much more backward country, morally and politcally.

The first well balanced acount of German Jewish History

As a native of Germany born immediately after WWII, I can truly say that this is the first book which explains the role of the German Jews through German History.Michael Blumenthal does a great job in balancing his book between actual historical events and the lives of his main characters. His extraordinary objectivity does not cast blame but tries to make sense of what happened to his people A book well worth reading. I hope that it will make my daugher better understand her mother's struggle with her German past.

i was there

hi, i just would liek to say,that this book was pretty good,because i grew up in the ddr.i was 9 years old,when the wall came down but i was not there,because my dad and i escaped a coulpe of days before. i recommend a book about something like that to everybody and i think it is really important,to know what happenend,right? thanx,nora

An excellent but still incomplete view.

I bought Blumenthal's book because, like many people, I have long sought to understand the persistence of "antisemitism" over at least two millenia. His book and Nora Ephron's review of Lindeman's book "Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews" in the Boston Book Review (1998) have begun to pull together a few of the pieces. I very much liked the scope and even-handedness of Blumenthal's book and would recommend it to anyone interested in either antisemitism, in the history of the Jews in Germany, or in the factors that contributed to Hitler's takeover in Germany. One thing that I didn't realize, for instance, was that the US stock market collapse of 1929 may have been a significant factor in tilting Germany into Hitler's hands.Blumenthal is clear in recognizing some of the components of Jewish behavior that contributed to the situation in Germany - the tendency of the Jews to come out on top financially whenever they were given a chance to compete, their tendency to wedge themselves in between the aristocracy and the rest of the people in Germany (letting the people blame the Jews for problems that were often the fault of the leaders), the tendency of the orthodox Jews to separate from the host people in dress and language and give the impression that they had disdain for the host people, etc. When inflammatory religious differences were thrown into this mix, the result was an unstable explosive mixture, especially when early Christians started the practice of blaming the Jews as a whole for the death of Jesus Christ.