Beneath his family tree, W. Michael Blumenthal digs at the roots of German-Jewish disaffection

By GEORGE M. TABER /PRINCETON

. Michael Blumenthal is a quintessential citizen of the 20th century world. Born in Germany in 1926, he fled Nazi persecution of the Jews in 1939 shortly after his father was released from temporary imprisonment in Buchenwald concentration camp. He grew up on the streets of Japanese-occupied Shanghai during World War II and in 1947 immigrated to the U.S. There, he studied at the University of California at Berkeley and at Princeton before rising to the top of two Fortune 500 companies--Bendix and Unisys--and serving as Secretary of the Treasury in the late 1970s. Today Blumenthal lives in Princeton, and is president of the Berlin Jewish Museum.

Although not a devout Jew, Blumenthal has long been preoccupied by what he calls the "why?" of German-Jewish relations. Why, he asks, did the Holocaust happen? His answer to that troubling question is The Invisible Wall: Germans and Jews--A Personal Exploration (Counterpoint, 444 pages). Henry Kissinger, another Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, calls it "one of the most impressive books I have read in a long time."

Blumenthal traces the relationship between the two peoples through the lives of six of his ancestors, ranging from Jost Liebmann, a wandering peddler who became court jeweler to the Brandenburg nobility in the late 18th century, to his father, who--though he had won an Iron Cross fighting for Germany in World War I--became Prisoner 5349 during his six weeks in Buchenwald.

It was a family that tried to assimilate into a German society it admired and helped develop. One of the family, Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, ran a noted literary salon in Berlin in the early 19th century. Another, Giacomo Meyerbeer, composed grand opera. Blumenthal's father said he had no interest in escaping the Nazis by joining Zionists in Palestine because he didn't want to live "with nothing but Jews." But, like thousands of other German-Jewish families, the Blumenthals never achieved their goal of assimilation. And like most of those who escaped the Holocaust they eventually returned to the Jewish roots they had once abandoned.

Blumenthal's book disappoints when it deals with his early family, where information is sketchy. It improves with more recent history. His account of life under the Nazis is chilling, and the description of wartime Shanghai is riveting: "Fortunes were made--and lost--overnight. All was possible, everyone was fair game, and life was cheap."

The Invisible Wall was written at a time when another book that attempts to answer the "why?," Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, was being debated in Germany and the U.S. Blumenthal disagrees with Goldhagen's contention that the mass of Germans quietly and willingly went along with the Nazis' genocidal policies. "I think he's wrong, very wrong," says Blumenthal. In the book, he writes: "There is no evidence to support the argument that most Germans knew of the killing, and nothing in German history to show that they would have approved it if they had."

Completion of The Invisible Wall affords Blumenthal the opportunity to concentrate on the Berlin Jewish Museum, which opens in 1999 and which he hopes will provide answers to the central question of the book. Says he: "You can't understand German history without understanding the history of thex German-Jewish minority, the interaction of Germans and Jews over hundreds of years, and the impact Jews had on German culture." The Invisible Wall is a good starting point to achieve that understanding.