Back within the land of childhood: Michael Blumenthal turns 100 | EUROtoday

W. Michael Blumenthal as soon as mentioned that the Jewish Museum Berlin was “one of the most beautiful adventures of his life.” And his hundred-year life was definitely not in need of adventures. Born in Oranienburg in 1926, his household fled after the November pogroms along with his father Ewald Blumenthal, a textile service provider, after his transient internment in Buchenwald within the spring of 1939 from Berlin to Shanghai, the place the household survived within the ghetto and emigrated to the USA in 1947. Blumenthal realized Chinese, English, French, Spanish and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in International Business from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1952 he grew to become a US citizen.

At Princeton he earned a Master of Public Affairs and a Ph.D. in economics, which rapidly introduced him into contact with US politics beneath Kennedy and Johnson. In 1977, Blumenthal grew to become Secretary of the Treasury in Jimmy Carter’s cupboard. High-ranking positions in US enterprise adopted.

After his profession as a supervisor and politician within the USA, Michael Blumenthal might have devoted himself totally to the comforts of retirement. Instead, in 1997, on the age of 71, he took on one of the crucial demanding honorary positions obtainable in Germany: he grew to become founding director of the Jewish Museum (JMB).

What luck for Berlin. In this metropolis you do not at all times roll out the pink carpet for giant concepts. When Blumenthal took over the home in 1997, there was some debate about whether or not the nonetheless unfinished new constructing by Daniel Libeskind ought to even grow to be an impartial museum – in any case, a Jewish division of the Berlin Museum or the Berlin City Museum Foundation may do the identical. Who would have dared to hope again then that the Jewish Museum Berlin, with its everlasting exhibition on two millennia of Jewish-German historical past, would become one of the crucial visited museums in Berlin – with greater than 700,000 guests yearly – and virtually grow to be one thing of a figurehead for the brand new Germany?

All of that is because of Michael Blumenthal. He gave the museum, he gave us, he gave Berlin the wealthy fruits of his life {and professional} expertise: his management qualities, his drive, his optimism and, final however not least, his wonderful contacts.

But what has at all times impressed me most in all of the years we have now identified one another is his capacity to suppose far past the current. The academy at JMB is one of the best instance of this. Blumenthal was not content material with telling the story of the Jews in Germany. In his private and historic expertise of discrimination and persecution, he additionally acknowledged a duty for the long run – the duty to advocate for the mixing of all individuals dwelling in Germany, no matter their faith or origin. The Jewish Museum Academy was born out of this sense of duty. Today it bears his title.

How vital such locations of studying are for peaceable coexistence in pluralistic societies is especially evident in these occasions: in occasions by which non secular and cultural conflicts are breaking out once more in lots of locations and by which we’re horrified to find that anti-Semitic slogans are being chanted uninhibitedly at rallies, even in Germany.

I really feel gratitude for his dedication and for his imaginative and prescient not solely in his official capability, but additionally as a cultural politician. It at all times touches me – and I believe that is the case with lots of his companions over the previous few years – that on the finish of a satisfying skilled life he returned to the nation from which he needed to flee along with his household in 1939 because the baby of Jewish dad and mom. The indisputable fact that Berlin may be his second residence once more immediately might be probably the most treasured present of his work. He lately utilized for German citizenship and has now acquired it – simply in time for his hundredth birthday, which he’s celebrating this Saturday.

Monika Grütters was Minister of State for Culture within the Federal Republic of Germany from 2013 to 2021.