German Autumn

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There is a place I like to go on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It is the Neue Galerie, a museum specializing in the art of Germany and Austria, much of it from what was a kind of golden age during the first part of the twentieth century. A gift shop features Austro-German design from the early twentieth century, and the bookstore sells German literature in German and translated into English (Goethe, Heine, Mann, and the great thinkers — Freud, Hegel, Spengler, Kant, Nietzsche, Marx, Jaspers), as well as books about the artists and the great expressionist filmmakers who influenced directors such as Alfred Hitchcock. Then I sit in the café, where they serve Riesling wine in little carafes (fruity but not the cheap postwar sugared variety) and spätzle and sausage and light crispy apfelstrudel with an imposing cloud of whipped cream, all consumed while listening to Mozart with some well-dressed older people at other tables whispering in the wonderfully expressive German language — a language that seems designed for expanding ideas. I sit there and think, this is what it would be like, this is how we would think of Germany, if Adolf Hitler had not come to power.

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