With the 2001 Opening OF Ronald Lauder's Neue Galerie in Manhattan on 86th St. and Fifth Ave., in the middle of Museum Mile, German and Austrian Expressionism has acquired more than a foothold in mainstream American culture. It has been given a permanent, centrally located showcase for German painting and related arts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, concentrating on the so-called Expressionist decade from 1910 to 1920. In the wake of the great exhibit of German Expressionist painting at the Guggenheim museum in 1981 (entitled Expressionism: A German Intuition, 1905–1920) that introduced the movement and painterly idiom to a general American audience for the first time on a large scale, much as the exhibit “Paris — Berlin” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris had done in France in 1978, or as an exhibit in Marbach had done in Germany in 1960, the Neue Galerie serves as a visible landmark in the steady incorporation of German Expressionism into American culture. In its conception and in its augustly elegant building, the Neue Galerie might have signaled, on the one hand, the confident establishment of German Expressionism in artistic and cultural history from the American perspective. On the other hand, the Neue Galerie might also have appeared as a kind of cultural mausoleum, where Expressionism had been laid to rest in public view, safely inert and therefore a mute object of our curatorial propensities and distant historical curiosity. But neither was the case: the museum opened instead during the period of mourning, disorientation, and heightened security following the destruction of the World Trade Center by terrorists on September 11, 2001. The installation of German Expressionism into the American landscape took place at a time when the financial euphoria and complacency of the boom years of the 1990s had been shattered by a terrorist act and the prospect of war. To underscore that change of mood, in January of 2002 the World Economic Forum, usually held on a “magic mountain” in pretty, placid Davos, Switzerland, convened instead in Manhattan, as a demonstration of moral and economic support for the anxious city.