German painter and printmaker Otto Dix, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of Weimar society and of the brutality of war, of which he is a highly-decorated veteran, had in 1924 joined the Berlin Secession; by this time he was developing an increasingly realistic style of painting that used thin glazes of oil paint over a tempera underpainting, in the manner of the old masters.

His 1923 painting The Trench, which depicted dismembered and decomposed bodies of soldiers after a battle, had caused such a furor that the Wallraf-Richartz Museum had hid the painting behind a curtain.

In 1925, the mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, had canceled the purchase of the painting and forced the director of the museum to resign.

Dix, widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), had been a contributor to the Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition in Mannheim in 1925, which featured works by George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, Karl Hubbuch, Rudolf Schlichter, Georg Scholz and many others.

Dix's work, like that of Grosz—his friend and fellow veteran—is extremely critical of contemporary German society and often dwells on the act of Lustmord, or sexual murder.

He draws attention to the bleaker side of life, unsparingly depicting prostitution, violence, old age and death.

Among his most famous paintings are the triptych Metropolis (1928), a scornful portrayal of depraved actions of Germany's Weimar Republic, where nonstop revelry had been a way to deal with the wartime defeat and financial catastrophe, and the startling Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926).

His depictions of legless and disfigured veterans—a common sight on Berlin's streets in the 1920s—unveil the ugly side of war and illustrate their forgotten status within contemporary German society, a concept also developed in Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.

When the Nazis come to power in Germany, they regard Dix as a degenerate artist and have him sacked from his post as an art teacher at the Dresden Academy.