This monograph illuminates a less well-known yet coherent and deeply familiar period in the artistic career of the German expressionist Erich Heckel (1883-1970). The book contextualizes the beginnings and the evolution of his work in the years from 1905 to 1918.

Like many German artists and intellectuals, Heckel volunteered to go to the front in 1914. He ended up on a hospital train that took him to Flanders (Belgium). He remained there until the end of the First World War, working as an orderly in Roe