This painting refers to a novella of the same name by Theodor Storm and bears witness to the artist’s intense preoccupation with pittura metafisica, a school of painting that emerged in Italy in 1910. On the one hand, Ernst visualizes the story, which recounts the tragic end of a forbidden love affair and the death of a child, soberly and coldly, with elements drawn from reality. On the other, he uses surreal accents to heighten the events. The viewer is confronted with a symbiosis of reality and dream. The painter, sculptor, draughtsman, and poet Max Ernst thus became a distinguished exponent of Dadaism and Surrealism.