Like many other bars at that time, the bar at Berlin's Hotel Eden was a meeting place for the Berlin bourgeoisie, who sought to drown the trauma of the lost war in a hedonistic ecstasy. Beckmann sketched the senselessness of these evenings very pointedly in the depiction of these three people. Although they sit close to one another, they don’t look at each other. Each one of them just gazes into an imaginary distance. In this work, Beckmann addresses the uncanny feeling of existential isolation in the midst of a crowd enjoying itself with great sensitivity. The back view of Johanna Loeb closes the composition in the front. Johanna Loeb was friends with Elsita Lutz, a singer from Argentina, who sits next to her. The sitter in the background, probably Elsita Lutz's husband, had business connections with Johanna Loeb's husband.
Beckmann's large-format woodcut is one of the most important he created in the 1920s. In letters to Reinhard Piper and Julius Meier-Graefe, Beckmann expressed his enthusiasm for Fritz Voigt, the famous Berlin printer who also printed the edition of this large-format woodcut. [EH]