In 1925/26, E. L. Kirchner traveled to Germany for the first time after many years. In the winter of 1925/26, Kirchner visited Frankfurt am Main, Chemnitz and Dresden and eventually Berlin, before returning to Davos for a while before setting off on another trip to Dresden in June 1926. During his stay, Kirchner saw the comprehensive collection of his friend and patron Carl Hagemann for the first time, visited the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, the "Galerie der Moderne" at the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, the most important art museums in Berlin, the "Internationale Kunstausstellung" in Dresden and got to know the dancers Mary Wigman and Gret Palucca, and fell in love with modern expressive dance. After years of living in seclusion in Switzerland, the artist now breathed the once familiar city air again and gathered many new impressions, which he expressed in drawings, prints and paintings over the months and years that followed. "The trips were very enlightening for me" (E. L. Kirchner, 26.9.1926, in: Lothar Grisebach (ed.), E. L. Kirchner's Davoser Tagebuch, Stuttgart 1997, no. 185, p. 108).

Kirchner wrote, not quite veraciously, that he had received "no artistic inspiration at all" from the trip, although this is easy to refute in many respects. After 1926, he created both a few cityscapes inspired by his so-called " Germany journey" as well as some street scenes, which, of course, revisit the subject of the famous street scenes from 1913/14, in terms of style, however, they represent an entirely different, new creative phase: Although they are characterized by great vibrancy and dynamics, the hectic pace and immediacy of the fleeting moment typical of the Berlin years has given way to a more elaborate composition, an almost architectural construction and ornamental arrangement of the surface: in the present drawing, too, the pictorial elements overlap and permeate one another, geometricall abstract forms, swirls, hatchings, gaps and dark areas are placed closely together to form a common shape. The pedestrians on the sidewalk in the foreground are designed as flat, almost ornamental shapes and forms. Globe-shaped lamps are lined up in the background, steam rises and the architecture provides stability to the composition. Kirchner created a metropolitan moment that, despite the inherent dynamic of strangers rushing past each other, brings Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's masterful draftsmanship to life in its sophisticated, painterly construction. [CH]