Erich Heckel was deeply connected with the depiction of landscapes. In it he found diverse possibilities of expression throughout all phases of his artistic work. Erich Heckel looked for these landscapes, he looked for and visited them on his travels, as well as on his regular stays in certain places. Landscapes enabled him to convey expressive moods in paintings, watercolors and the diverse possibilities of printmaking techniques.

After the end of the First World War, prints continued to be one of Erich Heckel's most important artistic means of expression, alongside paintings and watercolors. Stylistically, the landscape etching came into being at a time when Erich Heckel's pictorial language was beginning to change. At the beginning of the 1920s, the expressive and impetuous works of the young "Brücke" member gradually gave way to a pictorial world that became calmer, in which the composition gained clarity and the relationship to reality become clearer. In this work we see the view over the Flensburg outer fjord, where Heckel spent time from 1919 and found what he considered to be an ideal landscape, which he described as follows in a 1913 letter to Walter Kaesbach: "It's always the case that I have an ideal home and find pieces of it here and there, mountains and hilly landscape are just a part of it, flat plains like the heath in Oldenburg, and sea coast, a river landscape with people bathing, meadows with grazing horses, working, toiling people." (Erich Heckel, 7.7 .1913, quoted from: Karlheinz Gabler, Erich Heckel und sein Kreis, Stuttgart-Zürich 1983, p. 120). Heckel skillfully depicted elements of this ideal home in this work of the fjord landscape.

In 1913, Siddi and Erich Heckel first rented a boat from a boat builder in Osterholz, near Flensburg. In 1919 they were able to purchase the farmhouse in which they always lived. Osterholz remained a fixed point for Erich Heckel and his family, a retreat and source of strength. Erich Heckel formulated this explicitly in a letter to Lyonel Feiniger from May 15, 1919: "It is so good for both of us to live in this quiet, simple rural environment. All the memories of the war years come back to me more strongly, but maybe they will disappear and loose their weight. And above all, I'm getting stronger and healthier again" (quoted from Andreas Hünecke, Erich Heckel, catalog raisonné of paintings, vol. II, p. 462).
Not only this etching was made in Osterholz, a previously unpublished watercolor in the artist's estate also shows this view over the fjord. The catalog raisonné of paintings also lists the painting "Herbstlandschaft (Fördelandschaft, Fördelandschaft im Herbste [sic])" with the same motif (Hünecke 1924-19). The tranquility and vastness of the landscape shape the mood of the landscape, in the lower right corner a farmer and two other people are working in a field. It is, as Erich Heckel hopes in his letter to Lyonel Feininger, the quiet, simple rusticity that he sought and found in this place. [EH/AR]