The Städel Museum acquired this sculpture directly from the artist himself before the end of the First World War. The sculptor had developed the greatly elongated, spatially expansive type – whose thin limbs virtually give it a skeletal character – during the years he spent in Paris before the war. This youth is the last full-figure work executed by the artist, a victim of depressions, before his suicide. It was conceived as a monument to the war and cast in bronze in 1918. However, the sculptor also executed these representatives of the turbulent present, which he viewed as figures of existence, in materials that were used for fine art at the time, such as cast stone (cast cement).