The Invisible Wall : The Mystery of the Germans and the Jews

Rating:
Summary: brilliant, insightful well written book
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The first well balanced acount of German Jewish History
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: i was there
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant history of the Jews in Germany
Review: 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.