In May 1915, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff was drafted into military service as a non-combatant equipment service soldier. Initially he had to serve directly at the front in Russia, building trenches and barbed wire entanglements. In 1916, through the mediation of the poet and writer Richard Dehmel, the artist was transferred to the book auditing office of the press department of Hindenburg's headquarters in Kowno (today Kaunas, Lithuania), where he worked until the end of the war in 1918. He joined a community of other artists and writers, including the painters Magnus Zeller and Hermann Struck and the writers Alfred Brust and Arnold Zweig. Artistic work was only possible to a limited extent at this time. Schmidt-Rottluff created a few watercolors, wood sculptures and woodcuts, increasingly depicting religious themes, such as it is the case with the so-called "Kristus-Mappe", published in 1918, as well as his only series of book illustrations for a drama by his war comrade Alfred Brust.

The First World War had a lasting impact on the artist, but it did not throw him into depression, unlike it happened to his former "Brücke" colleague Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The expression of his paintings became darker, the figures often somewhat gloomy. "The whole agony of the war years had such an effect that I was still unable to free myself from it and felt very weak doing my work. I have regained some confidence in color, though [..]", Schmidt-Rottluff wrote in August 1919 from Hohwacht to his friend and collector, the art historian Wilhelm Niemeyer (quoted from: Gerhard Wietek, Schmidt-Rottluff in Hamburg und Schleswig-Holstein, Neumünster 1984, p. 62).

After moving to Berlin in 1911, Schmidt-Rottluff increasingly focused on formal aspects and developed an increasingly reduced, geometric style. After the war, he returned to Berlin and built on previous artistic considerations, which not only became apparent in the graphic works he had created towards the end of the war, but also in his watercolors. Instead of symbolic or direct references to war and destruction, he depicted a rural idyll with a bright sun that bathed the scene in a warm light emanating hope. At the time, he wrote to his collector friend Ernst Beyersdorf: "I am now under great pressure to create something as strong as possible - the war has really swept away everything from the past - everything seems dull to me, and I suddenly see the terrible violence about things. I have never liked art, which was a beautiful stimulus to the eye and nothing else, and yet I realize that one must resort to even stronger forms, so strong that they can withstand the force of such madness." (Quoted from: https://www.staatsgalerie.de/de/sammlung-digital/schwestern) [CH]