The Street, plate three from Die Hölle

This chaotic image introduces Max Beckmann’s interest in observing the variety of social types that surrounded him in the early Weimar Republic, including the wounded veteran at the right of this scene. Veterans were an ever-present sign of the war, which both left many of them crippled and led to the economic crisis forcing many to beg on the streets. Next to the veteran in this image, a bourgeois man in a bowler carries away another figure who is perhaps injured or incapacitated. Whether he is a revolutionary or wounded everyman, the crowds ignore this odd disruption in their midst.