| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Bernard Wasserstein. Secret War in Shanghai. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1998. Pp. xiv, 354. $26.00.

"Shanghai had always been notorious as a refuge for renegades, black sheep and bad hats," writes the author of this well researched and skillfully prosed book. "But the topsy-turvy morality of occupation seemed to dredge the worst human filth out of the mud of the Whangpoo" (p. 255). With this understanding, Bernard Wasserstein sets out to dredge the worst human filth out of various archives and portrays a Shanghai during Word War II, especially during the Japanese occupation, in thick covers of intrigue, betrayals, and collaborations. The story centers on the wartime experiences of a quaint collection of international swindlers, professional screwballs, would-be Nazis, fake royal relatives, greedy taipans, and occasionally bona fide spies. The piling of human filth and inhuman behavior never stops throughout the entire book and makes it a fascinating peek at the wild Shanghai that once was. 1

Yet, there is indeed a very serious and scholarly aspect of the picture. Wasserstein excels at sorting out various strands of life in wartime Shanghai and providing a concise panorama of the overall situation with regard to the communities of exiled Jews, bickering Western expatriates, and, best of all, mutually hostile Nazi/Japanese allies in the city. The descriptions on the prewar politics in the multinational Concessions are richly textured; the portrayals of the Russian and German Jews and Nazi operatives in occupied Shanghai are sophisticated and well documented. . . .

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