In October 1911, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner moved from the then rather provincial town of Dresden to Berlin, a metropolis with all the freedoms and liberties of a big city. Kirchner, a man of "seismographic sensitivity" (Buchheim 1956), must have felt the pulse of the city as a constant assault on his senses. He was attracted by the erotic flair, the accelerated tempo of constantly changing impressions. He sketched his way through the panorama: art dealers, critics and cocottes, bohemians and violin-playing beggars, journalists and gigolos, the big businessman, the small hustler and, again and again, women. A little romantic, a little sentimental, but at the same time a tough Venus, the cocotte is undoubtedly the epitome of the "asphalt jungle" at the end of the Wilhelmine era. She was one of the amusements on offer in the streets and squares of Berlin, a gaudy flower in the shopping basket of the circulating money business. And her "doings" are among the popular motifs of the "Berlin Street Scenes" created in the years 1913 to 1915. In addition to numerous drawings, watercolors, pastels and paintings, it is above all the etchings in which the artist depicted the hectic nightlife of the metropolis on the eve of the First World War. Kirchner captured the nocturnal hustle and bustle on Leipziger Strasse, a glamorous Berlin boulevard, in greater detail than in other paintings with similar motifs. Streetcars, street lamps, neon signs and pedestrians under arcades lined with stores convey a sense of the jittery pace of a modern city. On the left, in the foreground, we see two dressed up ladies - in Kirchner's street scenes these are usually cocottes - and two elegant men in tall hats following them. In the middle, a fully occupied streetcar of line 88 pushes forward between the two classicist guardhouses on Leipziger Platz: everything happens simultaneously and demands the viewer's immediate attention. [MvL]