W. Michael Blumenthal

Werner Michael Blumenthal was born on January 3, 1926, to a wealthy Jewish family of land bankers in Oranienburg. Attached to German culture, the Blumenthals rarely maintained Jewish traditions. Father Ewald Blumenthal was a textile merchant and a recipient of the Iron Cross. After the Blumenthals' bank, which had existed for three generations, was forced to close in 1929 due to mismanagement and the financial crisis, the family moved to Berlin. Moving from middle-class circumstances to a simpler life was not easy for the Blumenthals: at first, the family was accommodated in the cramped apartment of their grandmother, who was not particularly happy about her new guests. Blumenthal remembers "only vaguely an old-fashioned, dark apartment with high ceilings." A short time later, the family moved into an apartment in Charlottenburg.

In the crisis-ridden capital, the parents immediately went in search of work. Blumenthal described his mother as "energetic, ambitious [...][as a woman who] wanted to create something and who was energetic." During her daily walks through Berlin, Valérie Blumenthal looked at various stores and concluded that she could run a business much better than most people. A family friend then provided her with enough capital, which Valérie used to open a small store for fashionable women's items at Olivaer Platz 10 in 1932. The store was named "Wallys" in reference to the cose form of her first name.

Shortly after the opening of the "Wally", the family moved into a small apartment directly behind the store. Father Ewald stood behind the cash register, while the mother took over all other tasks. The store quickly achieved great success. Young Werner played marbles and rode scooters on the "Oli". Non-Jewish neighbors stopped by for a chat in the store. Werner Blumenthal spent happy and carefree years here.

After the business had run successfully for a while, the family took an apartment on Kurfürstendamm. They did not live on the Beletage of the front building - only a few could afford the huge stately apartments on Kurfürstendamm during the crisis years - but in the garden house, but the family was still proud of their new address. On Kürfürstendamm, with its cafés, cinemas, theaters and entertainment venues, the Blumenthals lived in a liberal, cosmopolitan and bourgeois neighborhood.

The appointment of Adolf Hitler as Reich Chancellor was soon followed by a boycott of Jewish businesses. In his biography, Blumenthal recalls the SA men who took up positions in front of "Wallys" and prevented customers from entering: "It is one of my earliest and most frightening memories."

When his elementary school years ended in 1936, Werner's school life changed abruptly. Jewish students were only allowed to attend regular high schools in exceptional cases. From then on, he went to the Jewish Waldschule Kaliski in Dahlem. Blumenthal describes the three years he spent at this high school for boys and girls as the "most important, most satisfying and most profound educational experience" of his life. The young people were prepared here for their departure. In addition to the foreign languages spoken in the main countries of exile, the students* learned manual skills that would be useful in building the state of Israel or finding work in exile. It was the first time he was part of an entirely Jewish community. Instead of National Socialist marching songs, he sang Jewish folk songs there and in this way developed an awareness of his Jewishness.

During the November pogroms 1938, tens of thousands of Jewish men were arrested and imprisoned in the course of a Reich-wide wave of arrests. Blumenthal's father was also imprisoned in Buchenwald for six weeks. When he returned, Werner hardly recognized his father; emaciated and with a shorn head, the imprisonment had visibly scarred him. His mother's store was devastated during the November pogroms, and Valérie was ordered to "Aryanize" the store. In the months that followed, the family made numerous plans to leave the country. Hardly any plan seemed feasible in view of the strict entry requirements of most countries.

The Blumenthals were among those who were lucky at the last minute: in 1939, they managed to leave the country for the international city of Shanghai. On the evening of April 6, 1939, the family departed from Anhalter Station. The atmosphere was oppressive. Between Wehrmacht soldiers, who were going on Easter vacation in good spirits, stood Jewish families who had to leave their homeland (forever). The Blumenthal family traveled first to Naples. From there, the "Haruna Maru" took them by sea to Shanghai. On the ship, reading was passed around to learn the English language and at the same time something about the Chinese business world - probably the least preparation for a completely new life.

Five months after the Blumenthals arrived in Shanghai, World War II broke out. The borders were closed and instead of a few months, the Blumenthals now had to stay in the Chinese metropolis for over eight years. Adapting to the tropical climate with its long rainy seasons demanded a lot from the Europeans. From what financial means they had left, they were able to take a room in the Concession Française. Their sister Stefanie, now 17 years old, worked as a nanny for an English family and was accommodated there. Werner Blumenthal attended the international Shanghai Jewish School until the war between China and the USA broke out in 1942. In the same year, his mother left the family to live with another man. Living conditions for Werner and his family became even worse when ghettos for Jewish refugees were established by the Japanese military authorities in February 1943.

Growing up in poverty-stricken Shanghai, in the "school of the streets," Blumenthal describes as a hard but also very adventurous and formative time. The experiences he had gathered during this period of his life were not only to determine his basic values for the future, but also to make something very clear to him: that "titles, possessions and all the trappings of position and status are fleeting."

Two years after the end of the war, W. Michael Blumenthal and his sister Stefanie boarded an American ship bound for San Francisco. He had already tried to emigrate after the end of the war, but was unable to do so due to bureaucratic hurdles. On board the troopship Marine Adder Blumenthal informed his sister of his decision to study at Berkeley. Blumenthal worked his way up to Berkeley via odd jobs and City College, where he made up for school absences from Shanghai. At the renowned university, he studied international economics and received a bachelor's degree in 1951. In addition, he became intensely involved in the history of the civil rights movement and now saw his adopted country, which he had initially greatly admired, in a more critical light. As a result, he began to become politically active.

In the fall of 1951, Blumenthal took up studies at Princeton in the state of New Jersey. He actually wanted to return to California, but things turned out differently: instead of a single master's degree, he earned several degrees at the elite American university, took his first job as a research assistant and kept his residence in Princeton for life. He did not begin his new phase of life at the renowned university alone: He had already married Eileen Polley in Berkeley in September 1951. Together they had three daughters, traveled the world and remained married for almost thirty years.

For his dissertation project on the German coal and steel industry, Blumenthal traveled to Germany for almost a year. At that point, 14 years had passed since he was forced to leave Berlin as a boy. "[Curious] about defeated Germany," he arrived in Cologne in August 1953. The state of the city did not permit him to take an apartment there. But in Münster, which had suffered less, an attic was found that could provide a home for the young Blumenthal family. W. Michael Blumenthal experienced the economic reconstruction and the second federal election. In the summer of 1954, he returned to the U.S. with a changed image of Germany, "wishing the Germans [indeed] all the best, but their country had remained alien [to him] in many respects."

Once again, a cruise was to lead significantly to a new chapter in Blumenthal's life: While playing chess on the Queen Elizabeth, he met Herman Ginsburg, an entrepreneur who manufactured crown corks. In his autobiography, Blumenthal still remembers the exact wording of Ginsburg's question: "Why does an ambitious young man like you prefer to sit in a university and study what others do rather than show what he's made of by doing it himself?" Blumenthal accepted the implicit challenge and became a manager at Crown Cork International.

With John F. Kennedy's victory in the November 1960 presidential election, not only did the U.S. political landscape change fundamentally, but so did the life of W. Michael Blumenthal. "The White House is on the line," Blumenthal's secretary announced on a February morning in 1961. Kennedy brought Blumenthal, a staunch Democrat, into his cabinet. For three years, he assisted the president as an adviser on trade issues in the State Department. Beginning in 1964, he served as the president's special representative for trade issues, with the rank of ambassador, in the Kennedy Round of Trade Negotiations regarding the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The so-called Kennedy Round was the largest trade negotiation of the postwar period.

When Blumenthal received an offer of a managerial post in 1967, he resigned from the diplomatic service. He cited the Vietnam War, which he opposed, as a major reason. For nine years, W. Michael Blumenthal worked as president and later chairman of Bendix International, a machine parts company.

In 1977, the phone rang again. Jimmy Carter, who had just won the presidential election, called Blumenthal and asked him which post he thought would suit him best. Blumenthal thought the post of Secretary of the Treasury was the right one for him. Immediately, Carter put this suggestion into action: W. Michael Blumenthal became his first Secretary of the Treasury and served under his administration for two and a half years.

Blumenthal describes the 1980s as "perhaps the most important decade of the century." The microchip revolution, with its sweeping changes in all areas, led him to make this statement. As the new vice president of Burroughs Corporation, Blumenthal was directly involved in this technological revolution. In 1986, he merged the company with Sperry to form Unisys, taking its place as chairman. In 1989, he stepped down from that post and the following year became a partner in the investment bank Lazard Frères, whose Frankfurt branch he headed.

The job at Lazard "had its dramatic and exciting moments [...], but on balance [it] did not satisfy me very much," is the summary in his autobiography. Shortly after he started work, Blumenthal's father died in San Francisco at the age of 101. He left him a family tree that goes back to the 17th century. Initially driven by pure curiosity, Blumenthal quickly developed "a deep interest in the history of German Jews." He wrote up his findings in the book "The Invisible Wall," which was published in 1998.

In October 1997, Blumenthal received a call from Wolfgang Benz, who had already supported him in his research on German-Jewish history and had been a special discussion partner for him. He asked him in the matter of the Jewish Museum Berlin: the building was almost finished, only it lacked content as well as concept. The debate between the Jewish community and the public about it was deadlocked. Benz believed he knew "the right man [...], for he was not asked to be a museologist or Judaist, historian or cultural scientist, but a personality with political skills, diplomatic flair, experience with committees, assertiveness and [...] with amiable manners," he argues in a portrait of Michael Blumenthal.

In fact, Blumenthal succeeded in smoothing waves where possible. He managed to get the entire Libeskind building made available to the Jewish Museum. The gala opening of the Jewish Museum Berlin took place on September 9, 2001. Since then, the museum has been one of the most popular and most visited sights in the capital.

With the Academy, founded in 2012, Blumenthal created a discussion forum that facilitates an exchange on current sociopolitical issues. The Jewish perspective enters into discourse here with other religious as well as ethnic minority perspectives. The building was later named the W. Michael Blumenthal Academy in his honor.

At his own request, Blumenthal resigned as founding director on September 1, 2014. To this day, he remains closely associated with the museum and assists it in an advisory capacity.