The Melancholy and Mystery of a Street is rife with premonition of the years to follow. The shadow girl can be easily understood as typical of post-Nietzschean humanity, playing childish games in blissful ignorance of what God’s death will bring—the unknown specter, propagating in through its aether; a spurious, Enlightenment-derived city space.
albert renger-patzsch ‘street in Essen at the train station’
giorgio de chirico ‘melancholy and mystery of a street