The following article is from our January 2008 issue.

Marzipan Returns To 'Sauerkraut' Boulevard The Neue Galerie brings the best of modern Germany to 86th Street: spectacular art and great food - By Uwe Siemon-Netto

New Yorkers used to call East 86th Street "Sauerkraut Boulevard." It has been the main thoroughfare of Yorkville, Manhattan's German neighborhood for most of the 20th century. In the 1990s, most central European restaurants, shops, bars and bakeries vanished, along with the German language. But then by happy coincidence, billionaire Ronald S. Lauder, now president of the Jewish World Federation, and art dealer Serge Sabarsky initiated the return of some of the best of modern German and Austrian culture to 86th Street - plus the finest of Viennese cuisine. Their museum, "Neue Galerie," is now a top tourist attraction in town, and its Café Sabarsky one of the most popular restaurants.

Nostalgia might be an exaggerated term for what one feels while reflecting on East 86th Street four decades ago. No, charming it was not. Still, you could buy good bread, great meats and sausages there in the Bremen-Haus. You could have a fine tipple in the Berlin Bar and wonderful pastries in the Café Hindenburg or the Kleine Konditorei. And if you were short of money, you would still be able to feed on delectable potato pancakes in a modest diner named Ideal Restaurant.

Young carousers loved to frequent the Rheingold dance hall where, as the old axiom went, comely au pair girls fresh off the boat from Germany were plentiful and had learned just enough English to say, "yes" but not yet progressed to "no." And their defenses could be further weakened over beef Rouladen and dumplings in the cozy Jäger-Haus around the corner.

Admittedly, all this was a little lowbrow, like the mushy movies shown in the German "Kino" (cinema) on the south side of the street, opposite the Rheingold. One thing is certain though - it had considerably more appeal than the hamburger and pizza joints and video stores that have been lacing East 86th Street ever since.

Come to East 86th Street these days, especially the posh end off Fifth Avenue, and be stunned. You will witness a German-American re-gentrification project in progress right there on the former Sauerkraut Boulevard. Outside a landmark building erected in 1914 in the style of the architecture of the Places des Vosges in Paris, you might spot two long lines spilling out onto the sidewalk.

The shorter of these lines snakes its way to the reception desk of the Neue Galerie currently exhibiting a breathtaking collection of Austrian artist Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), while the longer queue moves agonizingly slowly toward Café Sabarsky, the museum's restaurant. The word of mouth among the hungry is that everybody is in for a two-hour wait.

Old couples of middle European provenance from New York's Upper West Side and dashing young visitors from Paris, London, Sydney and Berlin hold each other's places when nature calls. "This must be an East German restaurant," joked a cynical old friend recalling the "sozialistische Wartegemeinschaft" (socialist waiting community), to which the state-run gastronomy of the German Democratic Republic had reduced that now-defunct country's population.

Of course, the comparison ends once you are finally inside. East German restaurants reeked and the food was sub-basic. But here, the smells and flavors of the best goulash prepared by Austrian star chef Kurt Gutenbrunner and the most delectable pastries this side of the Atlantic Ocean envelop you; here you are greeted by fin de siècle piano music and are suddenly propelled back to the elegance of Vienna's Belle Epoque.

You are in the imperial Vienna you probably wish had never disappeared; entering it will make you fume at the fools who destroyed all this by letting Europe slip into its fratricidal war of 1914, the year this mansion was raised, a bloodletting from which the old continent has never really recovered.

It was a period that had spawned German and Austrian expressionism, the glorious art form shown in the floors above, a style in which the Neue Galerie specializes and in which more than one million of its visitors have delighted so far, according to deputy director Scott Gutterman.

You might wonder why philanthropist Lauder and the former Viennese circus clown Serge Sabarsky (1912-96), whose mother died in Auschwitz, have invested so much money and energy to celebrate German and Austrian art here of all places, on 86th Street, which in the 1930s was a bastion of the pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic German-American Bund.

For a long time, New York collectors shunned paintings and sculptures from that part of Europe. Did it not raise eyebrows when Lauder and Sabarsky named one of the most elegant mansions in midtown Manhattan - in German - after Vienna's avant-garde Neue Galerie of the 1920s? "It might have," admitted Gutterman. "But if we ignored German art of the 20th century, we would hand the Nazis a posthumous victory, wouldn't we?"

There is delicious irony in the fact that the posthumous victory actually belongs to German and Austrian painters and sculptors who were persecuted by the Nazis for the "crime" of producing "degenerate art" - and that thanks to the generosity of two prominent Jews, this museum has now access to more than 1,400 pieces of their work, some of which are either gifts of or on loan from Lauder, others from the Sabarsky foundation.

One wonders where Chancellor Angela Merkel or her predecessor Gerhard Schröder would encounter such a high concentration of some of the most significant works of contemporary art from their own country had Lauder, chairman of Estee Lauder International, not fallen in love with it ever since purchasing an Egon Schiele drawing with his bar mitzvah money back in 1957 - and if he had not later befriended Serge (formerly Siegfried) Sabarsky whose New York gallery became Lauder's "post-graduate course on Austrian and German Expressionism."

Both Schröder and Merkel came to the Neue Galerie, as did German President Horst Köhler. "The Clintons, too, visit in regular intervals and their daughter, Chelsea, has become a member of the museum," said Gutterman who is already preparing, for 2009, a comprehensive exhibition of "Die Brücke" (The Bridge), the group of Dresden expressionist painters that included Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmitt-Rottluff, Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein.

At a time when New York is a bargain for Europeans thanks to the strong euro, they are pouring into this gallery in unprecedented numbers. Curiously, it isn't Germans and Austrians that represent the strongest contingent of foreign visitors − the British do. Still, the Neue Galerie is the one place on Sauerkraut Boulevard where German is once again spoken every day, and where even things German on a more pedestrian level than art have made a comeback.

"Let's go downstairs to the café," pleaded a young lady from Berlin to her boyfriend after a tiring tour of the museum and its unique book store specializing in art, architecture and literature from Germany, Austria and central Europe, "I am longing for something with marzipan, and I can't think of any other place in America where we can still find it."

- Uwe Siemon-Netto, a veteran foreign correspondent from Germany and a Lutheran lay theologian, is scholar in residence at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis.