The Spirit of God Above the Waters (Der Geist Gottes uber den Wassern)

Religious imagery, overtly Christian as well as implicitly sacred, was relatively frequent in German Expressionism before World War I. The horrific trauma of the Great War increased this religious orientation, and younger Expressionist painters, printmakers, and sculptors emerging during and after the war likewise took up variations on religious iconography. This wartime drawing by Christian Rohlfs alludes to the Biblical story of the creation of the world through God's separation of land from water to create the Garden of Eden. The first years of the new Weimar Republic in Germany were marked by armed revolts, strikes, assassinations, hunger, epidemics, and failed reactionary revolutions to bring back the old monarchy. For some artists, the hopelessness of the times caused the loss of secular faith in modernity and seemed almost to demand such a turning to God after human efforts had failed so disastrously.