Carl Sternheim, 1916

The furrowed face of an intellectual with a domed forehead, slanted cat eyes, a moustache and a rounded chin, resting on his hand angled in a rather affected manner, provides a psychogram of the German dramatist, novelist and poet Carl Sternheim (1878–1942). Hailing from a bourgeois family, he caused scandals with his caustic-ironic plays, in which he satirized the rigid bourgeois morality of the Wilhelmine era. The nervous-blurry strokes, with which Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) carved out the physiognomy of the writer from the dark background, appear as if Kirchner attempted to sound out the nature of a soulmate and to capture the vibrant atmosphere of this time which both of them –Sternheim as a writer and Kirchner as a painter and graphic artist – actively shaped as co-founders of German Expressionism.

MH, 2023