The following article is from our November 2007 issue.

Goodbye to Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse Once America's most German street, North Lincoln Avenue in Chicago has evolved into a multicultural boulevard. But the Brauhaus and the Apotheke endure - By Uwe Siemon-Netto

A century ago, Chicago was the world's sixth largest German-populated city. It even had a Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse. That's what the residents of the Windy City's German neighborhood called their main street, even though its official name even then was North Lincoln Avenue. Now the Brauhaus, the Merz-Apotheke and the Salamander shoe shop are the last vestiges of a vanishing culture. Even so, North Lincoln Avenue is developing new European charms.

Times change. Yuppies have taken over the enchanting little park with its gurgling fountain opposite the Brauhaus on North Lincoln Avenue. The innkeeper, Harry Kempf, is rather displeased with them. Not that Kempf has anything against young people. On the contrary, most of the 500 patrons eating dumplings and rouladen, sauerbraten or sausages in his tavern, one of the few genuine German restaurants in America, are astonishingly young. There are immigrants from Eastern Europe and East Asia; there are also many black people, but most are your typical white Midwesterners in their 20s and 30s, all having a wonderful time emptying huge steins of beer and tapping their feet to the oom-pah provided by imported Bavarian and Austrian musicians.

"But those yuppies," growls Kempf, pointing to the cluster of lissome and well-dressed people congregating on the little square bearing his and his brother Guenther's name. "Those yuppies are unlike anything I've ever known," he said. "The husbands push the strollers and the wives chatter on their cell phones, which is fine with me. But then they suddenly take off, like a flock of birds, racing their baby carriages through my front door, through the restaurant past my guests and waitresses, and out the back door to a parking lot. In my 70 years, I've never seen a more self-centered generation. Why can't they just walk around the building? It would do them some good."

Welcome to the 21st century's clash of cultures, between Us and Them. It has been a long time since Kempf, a toolmaker and musician by training, left his hometown of Elbing in West Prussia, now Poland, for Meersburg on Lake Constance in West Germany, and eventually Chicago. Things were different back then, he says, but hastens to add: "In fairness, they are not what they used to be over there either. Recently, I sat in a restaurant in Karlsruhe waiting to be served. Finally I reminded a waitress, 'I have been sitting here for 40 minutes now.' She snarled back, 'Don't you see I'm busy?"

Kempf shakes his huge head and recalls how he told her he wouldn't allow such a thing: "In my place, you would have been fired on the spot for that remark." Although the Brauhaus has a distinctly Bavarian flair with its annual Oktoberfest and lots of decorations in Bavarian white and blue, he runs his staff with strict Prussian discipline. Evidently his employees like it; they would not have stayed around so long otherwise. One waitress, Doris, has been with him for 40 years, another for 35.

Occasionally Latino lawyers or doctors stop by to thank him for the stern treatment he had meted out to them when they earned their tuition as busboys at the Brauhaus. One winter morning, for example, they arrived at work an hour late blaming the snow. "Well, you knew last night that it would snow," Kempf told them coldly, "Why didn't you get up an hour earlier to be here on time?" "Gracias," they now tell him. "Let us buy you a drink. You taught us how to succeed in life."

It's tempting to call Kempf a fossil of this once very German city. Yet he definitely has a place in the long list of Germans who left their marks here on one level or another. Chicago's first streetcar conductor was a German by the name of Adolf Müller, as were Heinrich Kherken, its first grave digger, Kaspar Lauer, Chicago's first cop and Angelina Vaughn, née Hebert, its first divorced woman. There was a time when Chicago's postmaster was traditionally a German.

German soldiers died in the Chicago area battling Native Americans. Germans founded the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, one of the world's best, and Loyola University. They introduced antiseptic surgery and the first x-ray machine to this city. They established hospitals for the poor, unions, breweries and health insurance; they even introduced, in the 19th century, the manly fashion of sporting a beard - all in Chicago.

The city's architecture, among the most stimulating in North America, includes buildings by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and - much later - Helmut Jahn. The massive and now defunct "Germania Club," with its 300-square-foot ceramic mosaic depicting, well, Germania, hosted the Kaiser's brother Prince Heinrich in 1904 after a lustful night in the most luxurious local house of ill repute. Albert Einstein ate here too, albeit under more dignified circumstances, as did West Germany's first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, when he visited Chicago in 1956 to thank local German notables for their aid in rebuilding the war-ravaged country.

Actually, this club's fate might serve as a metaphor for the story of Germans in Chicago as a whole. The club vanished ingloriously because Germans, though historically the largest group of immigrants in America, have rarely stuck together. This is as true now as it ever was. "Keeping track of ethnic Germans in Chicago and its surroundings is like minding a bag of fleas," an exasperated diplomat who served here as consul some time ago told The Atlantic Times.

There are prewar immigrants and postwar immigrants. There are those who immediately melted into the great American pot and those who clung together chauvinistically, according to their regional origins, whether Swabian, Bavarian or Saxon. German-speakers also came from the Soviet Union and the Balkans. The Nazi years and their aftermath brought their own wave of immigration. It included much of the city's large German-Jewish community as well as people nurturing nostalgia for the Germany that others revile.

Then there are the "expats": managers, scientists, engineers and skilled specialists, working for subsidiaries of the 900 German corporations scattered around the Midwest, including 300 concentrated in Chicago. But these, too, have melted into the larger American population and have little contact with the other groups. By contrast, the French, long ago the colonial masters of this part of America but numerically insignificant compared with Germans, vigorously cultivate their language here with much support from the government in Paris, while the Germans, on paper a massive community, have a hard time passing theirs on to their young.

Too great is perhaps the gulf between the likes of Hanna Holborn Gray, the Heidelberg-born historian with 60 honorary doctorates who, from 1978 to 1993, was the first female president of a major U.S. university, the University of Chicago, and the amazing Kempf, Herr of the Brauhaus, one of the last authentically German institutions here. One wonders if this giant of a woman has ever longed sufficiently for a plate of spaetzle to drive from her presidential mansion in South Chicago to Kempf's neighborhood of North Lincoln Avenue.

Gray, herself renowned for her stern self-discipline, might have seen a kindred spirit in this 70-year-old quintessential Prussian, who was recently found standing in his spotless kitchen preparing 5,000 liver dumplings with his son, Alfred, 41. Whether Gray still likes German food or not, she would probably concur with this man's disdain for what passes for German cuisine in the United States today - if not because she shares his palate so much as the philosophy behind it. "Real German cooking is extremely labor intensive," he said. "Unless you know what you are doing and are prepared to work hard on a dish, you produce garbage, and that's what most of those allegedly 'traditional German restaurants' from the Canadian border to the southern tip of Florida serve up."

For him, feeding hungry mouths and pouring a good beer - itself a product of craftsmanship - is a vocation on a par with teaching, designing skyscrapers, conducting an orchestra or running the post office. This work ethic survives at this spot on North Lincoln Avenue, although the street's authentically German features have been whittled down to the herbal scents of the Merz-Apotheke, a pharmacy founded in 1875, a boutique selling "Ingrid's Moden" and the Salamander shoe shop.

With its Greek taverna and an Italian trattoria flourishing side-by-side with the steadfastly German Brauhaus, North Lincoln Avenue has evolved from a bratwurst bastion to a kaleidoscope of authentic cuisines. One day, a group of total strangers, having found Kempf's establishment on the Internet, telephoned all the way from Berlin to reserve a table. "And guess what?" he said. "Punctually like true Prussians, they arrived 7:30 p.m. in a fleet of stretch limos straight from O'Hare Airport gasping for a real German meal."

- Uwe Siemon-Netto, a veteran German journalist and Lutheran lay theologian, is scholar-in-residence at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.