City of Masks: A Novel of Shanghai by Mike Blumenthal

W. Michael Blumenthal, founding director of the Jewish Museum Berlin and former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, presented his debut thriller at the JMB last year to great interest. Now, “Mike” Blumenthal returns to present his gripping new novel, City of Masks: It is a fast-paced thriller of grifters, gangsters, and spies in World War II Shanghai.

Part authentic history and part cliff-hanging story of a POW escape, OSS (Office of Strategic Services) sabotage of the Japanese war effort, bravery under pressure and the struggle for survival of holocaust refugees in the place the world knew as “Sin City”. 

When Paul Obermann, wanted in San Francisco for insurance fraud, surfaces in Shanghai to hide from American law he is quickly enmeshed in the city’s world of vice, crime and political intrigue. Recruited by OSS as a spy with a chance for redemption in his home country, Obermann is left on his own caught in a perilous world and with the Japanese military hot on his heels. With the mysterious Steffi, a holocaust survivor from Nazi Germany at his side, he must race to save an OSS missive gone wrong from disaster – can they save the mission and warn the German refugees in time of Nazi plans for their destruction?

Blumenthal’s book authentically portrays international Shanghai in its final days before and during its Japanese occupation, and no one is better qualified to tell his story: A refugee from Nazi Germany, he lived there for eight years during that period, including a time of confinement in a Japanese-mandated refugee ghetto. A postwar immigrant to the U.S., he has had a successful highly varied career in academia, business and public service as a diplomat, cabinet member and writer. 

He is the author of two books of non-fiction; The Invisible Wall (1998) and From Exile to Washington (2013). A prior novel, The Payday Conspiracy, was published in 2025.